Memory and Paging

[John Hubbard]

My computer has some memory.  When I need more memory than the computer 
writes some of the stuff in memory to the hard drive to free up the 
memory.  This is troublesome because the hard drive is very slow.  While 
moving stuff around the computer often slows way down since there is no 
free memory.  To fix things I often need to kill the run away task.  
(Usually some code that I have written that is misbehaving or behaving 
properly, but using more memory than I expected.)  When in this state, 
it often takes a very long time to ssh into the machine to kill the task 
in question.  I am trying to figure out a solution to this problem.  It 
seems like I would need to do a few things. 

1) Have a process running that 'owns' a certain amount of memory (enough 
to run bash/top/kill/pidof and a few other small programs) and keeps 
this memory from being paged out. 
2) Enough memory set aside for SSHD to allow a new connection. 
3) Some way to ssh in and access that memory owning process or request 
memory from that process. 

Is there any way to do these things?  Does someone else have a different 
approach that accomplishes the same thing?  How much memory am I talking 
about?  Would 5MB be enough?  Any other thoughts or comments?

-- 
-john

To be or not to be, that is the question
                2b || !2b
(0b10)*(0b1100010) || !(0b10)*(0b1100010)
        0b11000100 || !0b11000100
        0b11000100 || 0b00111011
               0b11111111
        255, that is the answer.