Distro: Archlinux 5.6.10-arch1-1 The machine hangs when it reaches 100% memory usage. To be more exact, the performance drops to 1hz speed, which means that you have to wait more than 1 hour for a bash script to be executed manually and kill all the possible processes involved that consume too much memory. I don't have swap. It has also already been tested with a swap file using a mounted loop, even if both fill to 100%, the machine hangs. What gets filled is the memory used and not the buffer/cache. Using a test code, it never returns an 'out of memory' or OOM Killer never responds: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <unistd.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { for (;;) { char *buf = (char *)malloc(65535); if (!buf) { fprintf(stderr, "memory maxed out!\n"); usleep(1000000); }usleep(100); } return 0; } possible non-relevant information: I use a USB pendrive with a fake HDD configured from the BIOS. It's because I don't use swap.