I have a Fedora 21 on my notebook and it sometimes runs out of memory. The notebook has 4GB of system RAM and the OS takes up only about 450MB of disk space.
I am sure that the culprit is Chromium; which seems to have memory leaks. The problem is that the OS freezes and only hard restart works. I found some info about “Out Of Memory” killer, but it was mostly server stuff.
What is the best approach to this problem on workstations?
The root of your problems is you are running out of virtual memory, this is causing your system to lock up long before you actually run out of available physical memory. You need to enable a swap partition on your system and you should see your lockup problems disappear.
Please read this answer from a question that was having similar problems to you but on Windows, it explains in detail why you need a swap file on a modern operating system.
Not running swap on a SSD was only true for first generation drives from the early 2000's. Modern SSD's lifespan have no issue with running swap on it, in fact if you have the choose between a spinning hard disk drive and a SSD putting the swap on SSD will improve your performance.
