Add swap (Windows does that, too) and never use more memory than you have RAM (edit: ..in one process). Storing swap on a quick storage adds to the fun and the price.
The one trick, SSDs don't like.
The one trick, SSDs don't like.
I know the solution is to never use more memory than I have RAM, but that's just what happens - and I know there is no way to "solve" the issue and make it magically run. The issue is HOW it is handled... It's weird that other OSs can deal with this, while Linux needs to be restarted.
I think the issue is that only a handful of (Matlab) processes eat up all the RAM, so this "OOM" can not really do anything - there's no use killing off other processes. What should probably happen is to kill Matlab or one of its processes, even though it is in use. I'd be fine with that. Give some out of memory error and kill or suspend the process. At least then we know.
Instead, the system just locks up completely (because the other threads keep trying to push stuff into memory), but is not actually dead, so we don't even catch the issue. Also, because EVERY process is essentially stalled, you can't even kill Matlab yourself. Or suspend it and dump the data, which would be useful. No, you have to hard reset the machine.
What really confuses me is that this kernel was developed when SSDs didn't exist, so how on earth did "The system becomes irrecoverably unresponsive if a single application uses too much RAM" get missed?
I don't know, there are/were several similar issues (very basic situations, frequently encountered by everyone or at least many people) which are/were not fixed for years (we might say decade(s)): that one dealing with memory exhaustion; then right after that, the problem which follows when memory is freed but the system is still unresponsive for several minutes(!); freezing when writing to a USB disk; freezing when something goes wrong on a NFS mount...
I never understood why those common and really important issues were not tackled (or not tackled before many, many years). IMO they were such basic functionalities, which a proper OS is expected to perform reliably as a basis for and before all the rest, it should have been dealt with and granted highest priority.
Servers can be provisioned with way more than enough memory for its use case and can have spares configured to take up the load if it has to be killed.
On the desktop side the issue happens far less if you have more than enough memory. A developer running vim and firefox/chrome on his 32GB of ram machine is vastly less likely to experience this issue than a cheap laptop with 4GB of ram.