Hi Hendrik,

My experience when I end up swapping to a hard drive is that the whole

system becomes so slow and unresponsive that it mosstsly ignores console input, and I have no ability to kill things before the OOM does. Often the best way to get things moving again is a hard reset. And then watching it repair the filesystems.

well, in Linux 4.10 there is kind of a solution - writeback throttling allowing "skipping parts of the queue" as described in https://lwn.net/Articles/682582/ .

Cheers,

Jan