Re: If only he got so passionate about Linux freezing when it runs out of memory...
Libc malloc should never return NULL until you have exceeded the heap size of your process. This could happen in x86 32bit world where the malloc/process space is around 3GB ; libc malloc should sleep infinitely until a memory page is made available via virtual memory reclaim steps. An 64b process would behave the same, although the process address space is match larger. What really causes system hangs in the kernel's inability to alloc vmalloc space; that is when system calls start failing and Out of Memory process starts killing off random memory hogs.