Greetings,

Several times over past few years I've seen user processes "go mad" 
(programming error) & use all RAM, then all swap (as ganglia so vividly 
shows), then the box ends up at a kernel panic.
(Server OS is SL5.x 64-bit BTW)

What's puzzling is, shouldn't the OS by default not allow users to do 
"something bad enough" to cause grief to the OS?

Possibly some sort of tuning can fix this, but one expects that, out of 
the box, this should not be needed, users just can't bring OS down.

In the past on SL4 I did see oom come into play when box too 
loaded (killing the mysqld process for instance) & am wondering
why this isn't happening on SL5 with badly behaved user processes.

Grateful for advice!