Happy Friday!

> The one way I know about to reliably prevent these problems is to use 
> syctl to change the value of vm.overcommit_ratio, and possibly adapt 
> vm.overcommit_memory. Both are documented in proc(5).

Ok, if time may look into it, but we were wishing there were "sensible
defaults" set, out of the box so to speak.

> By any chance, were your SL4 systems mostly 32-bit, and your SL5 systems 
> are mostly 64-bit?
Confirmed. I noted the difference btw SL4 doing something sort of 
reasonable & SL5 not.

> There's always GRSec and the like if you would like to run a modified
> kernel.**
Absolutely not but thank you anyway.

> Having sufficient swap space does help.
...
> Users just turn off the box if it goes unresponsive for more than a few
> minutes, which is what happens when you have lots of swap allocated and 
> it starts paging itself to death.

Server has 16GB RAM & 20GB swap; problem is, it's a compute server used by 
many. So one user (later mortified & remorseful, but) causes grief for 
many. And a forced reset is always a concern re: possible filesystem 
corruption. 

Thank you all very much for enlightenment + advice.