Linux robustness

Something happened the other day which made me appreciate the
robustness of linux. We have a developer machine with a bunch of
developer accounts.

Due to a bug, one program grew to about 18 gigabytes of virtual
memory. Since we only had 4GB of RAM on that computer, everything was
swapped out and very slow.

Due to that, another bug showed up where another process was spawning
'ps' processes a lot.

So when I looked at that machine, it used about 20 GB of virtual
memory out of 4 GB of physical RAM and had 20,000 processes running.

I started killing stuff and finally cleaned it up and the machine is
back to running.

I know for a fact that Windows bluescreens in much less terrible
conditions (same program by same developer ran out of memory and
crashed windows)
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