Out of Memory

There's something going disturbingly wrong with my debian setup ... I thought it was mainly an issue with firefox, where the whole system froze and became completely unresponsive when youtube's scripts push the browser out of memory bounds. But it just happened as I tried to convert a too complex picture into a stack of svg path with inkscape while still having gimp opened with the bitmap edits and consuming about 3G of RAM to host them.

Usually, I can then access a text terminal and launch the top tool to kill the process that went crazy, but with that debian 12, it seems like it couldn't even keep that in memory ... too often, I end up having no other option but forcing the system to shut down, losing whatever state I had on the machine.

A message on stack exchange describes quite accurately what is possibly going wrong: the system has been assigning so much memory to data that it started stealing pages of executable code from processes ... and unfortunately, those processes call these pages back, forcing the swapper to find something else to kill, again and again. the "Out Of Memory" behaviour of the system does not kick in, or not before things have been running wild for over 10 or 20 minutes.

I've found some blog page presenting "Early OOM", an alternative that would kill memory-hoggers process in advance. Got it installed ... Got to check whether it helps ... Still have to write a wrapper to firefox launcher that would ulimit its consumption of virtual memory (did check it is effective).

(Maybe having a look at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/EnableSystemdOomd could be useful, although it is for fedora installs) 

Spotting systemd_oomd running on my ubuntu (virtual) machine ...