My advice on implementing stuff in C:

> it's not always--perhaps not even often--that the offending process gets killed; it's the next guy paging in a small amount of memory that gets killed.

Actually, the OOM-killer tries *very* hard to not simply kill the next guy paging in a small amount of memory, but to determine what the real problem process is and kill that instead. It doesn't always find the correct culprit, but it often does, and at least it tends not to kill your ssh session.