Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera Possible Solution out of RAM on Linux. This is an application called Low-Memory-Monitor, which should solve the problem of system responsiveness when there is not enough RAM. This program is expected to improve the Linux user environment on systems where RAM is low.
The principle of operation is simple. The Low-Memory-Monitor daemon monitors free RAM and notifies other user-space applications when it becomes critically low. After that, you can select the necessary action - disabling unnecessary programs, stopping their work, and so on.
By the way, an analogue of Low-Memory-Monitor has been on Android for a long time. The program itself on FreeDesktop.org, anyone can download it. True, at the moment there are no results of a full-fledged testing of the utility, so it is difficult to talk about its effectiveness. However, the fact that they are at least trying to solve the problem is already encouraging. It is possible that in the future Low-Memory-Monitor or a similar system will become part of the kernel or at least the recommended software.
At the same time, we note that a similar problem on Windows does not lead to a "freeze" of the desktop. Although it is possible that the explorer.exe process will simply “fly out” of memory and will have to be started manually. But at the same time, the desktop itself will function as before.
Thus, it turns out that proprietary programs also have a couple of tricks up their sleeve, and open source is not always good only because of its openness.
Source: 3dnews.ru