Well, there probably needs to be a way to override the heuristic at least, sort of a 'this process is important, don't auto-kill it if trying to find memory'.

As for ssh specifically, I rarely ssh into my desktop machine, but I keep sshd running for just this kind of situation where I might need to try and rescue a swamped machine. So in most cases low-volume sshd use is exactly what is called for.

If you're running into the memory purge of doom on a server that's probably a whole different nightmare scenario.

malloc returning NULL has been a broken assumption for a long time though, and that isn't going to change afaik.