The policy I prefer is to kill things based on their age, youngest
first, perhaps excluding processes that are very small or owned by root.
This has two features that I think are important. The first is that X
clients will die before the X server. The second stems from the kind of
jobs I typically run. These are large CAD jobs that take several hundred
Meg of ram and can run for several days. The last thing I want to happen
after 20 hours of runtime is for someone to login to the machine and
fire up netscape and have it kill my CAD job because it needs more memory.
If I was there first I should get priority.
Jim