A couple of days ago, I had the painful experience of having a process slowly but surely eating up all the available memory, filling up the swap memory, living me agonizing in front of a computer that wouldn't respond, too busy as it was to slowly die. If I take the trouble to relate the experience, it's because I believe a proper Linux distribution should take pro-active measures so prevent this kind of occurrence and allow the experienced user to take measures to recover from a potentially disastrous mistake.