Earlyoom
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The oom-killer generally has a bad reputation among Linux users. This may be part of the reason Linux invokes it only when it has absolutely no other choice. It will swap out the desktop environment, drop the whole page cache and empty every buffer before it will ultimately kill a process. At least that's what I think that it will do. I have yet to be patient enough to wait for it, sitting in front of an unresponsive system.
This made me and other people wonder if the oom-killer could be configured to step in earlier: reddit r/linux, superuser.com, unix.stackexchange.com.
As it turns out, no, it can't. At least using the in-kernel oom-killer. In the user space, however, we can do whatever we want.