Quote: "maybe kill some of them" Quote: "You also don't want to have a cascading failure where a massive leak makes all your machines fill their ram, and start killing everything like crazy."

Cascading failures are a very real thing that have knocked whole systems offline.

It sounds like the real solution is a balanced solution involving some engineering: kill them if you aren't killing _everything_. Page if the problem is ongoing, not if a couple of machines have a problem.

Either way, you can add swap _and_ kill them. One does not preclude the other.