Sounds like a good idea for systems that are absolutely hammered. `htop` could add a `--kill` flag, or maybe `--kill-ram` / `--kill-cpu` which would first try to kill the most ram/cpu intensive application, and then load the UI.

I've ended up in a couple of situations where servers are so hammered it takes five minutes just to get a ssh session up and running because some process took up all CPU/RAM and was barely able to do anything in the server itself. Something like that could maybe help.