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They talk about it:
Why does linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer not run automatically, but works upon sysrq-key?
Why does OOM-killer sometimes fail to kill resource hogs?
Preloading the OOM Killer
Is it possible to trigger OOM-killer on forced swapping?
How to avoid high latency near OOM situation?
https://lwn.net/Articles/104179/

They talk about it:
Why does linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer not run automatically, but works upon sysrq-key?
Why does OOM-killer sometimes fail to kill resource hogs?
Preloading the OOM Killer
Is it possible to trigger OOM-killer on forced swapping?
How to avoid high latency near OOM situation?
https://lwn.net/Articles/104179/
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=233843

For years, the OOM killer of my operating system doesn't work properly and leads to a frozen system.
When the memory usage is very high, the whole system tends to "freeze" (in fact: becoming extremely slow) for hours or even days, instead of killing processes to free the memory. The maximum that I have recorded is 7 days before before resigning myself to operate a reset. In this situation, the iowait is very very high (~ 70%), before becoming unmeasurable.
The tool: iotop has showed that every programs are reading at a very high throughput (per tens of MB/sec) from my hard drive.
What those programs are reading ?

[edited] At the time I wrote this message (in 2017) I was using an uptodate ArchLinux (4.9.27-1-lts), but had already experienced the issue for years before. I have experienced the same issue with various Linux distributions and different hardware configurations. Currently (2019), I am using an uptodate Debian 9.6 (4.9.0) I have 16 GB of physical ram, a SSD on which my OS is installed, and no enabled swap partition. Because of the amount of ram that I have, I don't want to enable a swap partition, since it would just delay the apparition of the issue. Also, with SSDs swapping too often could potentially reduce the lifespan of the disk. By the way, I've already tried with and without a swap partition, it has proved to only delay the apparition of the problem, but not being the solution.

If you need more information, have a suggestion, please tell me.

For years, the OOM killer of my operating system doesn't work properly and leads to a frozen system.
When the memory usage is very high, the whole system tends to "freeze" (in fact: becoming extremely slow) for hours or even days, instead of killing processes to free the memory. 
The maximum that I have recorded is 7 days before resigning myself to operate a reset. 
When OOM is about to be reached, the iowait is very very high (~ 70%), before becoming unmeasurable.
The tool: iotop has showed that every programs are reading at a very high throughput (per tens of MB/sec) from my hard drive.
What those programs are reading ?

[edited] At the time I wrote this message (in 2017) I was using an uptodate ArchLinux (4.9.27-1-lts), but had already experienced the issue for years before. 
I have experienced the same issue with various Linux distributions and different hardware configurations. 
Currently (2019), I am using an uptodate Debian 9.6 (4.9.0) I have 16 GB of physical ram, a SSD on which my OS is installed, and not any swap partition.

Because of the amount of ram that I have, I don't want to enable a swap partition, since it would just delay the apparition of the issue. 
Also, with SSDs swapping too often could potentially reduce the lifespan of the disk. 
By the way, I've already tried with and without a swap partition, it has proved to only delay the apparition of the problem, but not being the solution.

If you need more information, have a suggestion, please tell me.

Documentation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_%28computer_science%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_overcommitment
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
https://lwn.net/Articles/317814/

They talk about it:
Why does linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer not run automatically, but works upon sysrq-key?
Why does OOM-killer sometimes fail to kill resource hogs?
Preloading the OOM Killer
Is it possible to trigger OOM-killer on forced swapping?
How to avoid high latency near OOM situation?
https://lwn.net/Articles/104179/

[edited] At the time I wrote this message I was using an uptodate ArchLinux (4.9.27-1-lts), but had already experienced the issue for years before. I have experienced the same issue with various Linux distributions and different hardware configurations. Currently I am using an uptodate Debian 9.6 (4.9.0) I have 16 GB of physical ram, a SSD on which my OS is installed, and no enabled swap partition. Because of the amount of ram that I have, I don't want to enable a swap partition, since it would just delay the apparition of the issue. By the way, I've already tried with and without a swap partition, it has proved to only delays the apparition of the problem, but not being the solution.

[edited] At the time I wrote this message (in 2017) I was using an uptodate ArchLinux (4.9.27-1-lts), but had already experienced the issue for years before. I have experienced the same issue with various Linux distributions and different hardware configurations. Currently (2019), I am using an uptodate Debian 9.6 (4.9.0) I have 16 GB of physical ram, a SSD on which my OS is installed, and no enabled swap partition. Because of the amount of ram that I have, I don't want to enable a swap partition, since it would just delay the apparition of the issue. Also, with SSDs swapping too often could potentially reduce the lifespan of the disk. By the way, I've already tried with and without a swap partition, it has proved to only delay the apparition of the problem, but not being the solution.