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