The obvious solution to that is "increase your swap." Why worry about memory issues when disk space is so cheap? (I get the same problem at $work, too, and it frustrates me to no end - they don't realise that for about 1 day of my pay, they could get a TB of disk space, and practically never worry about swap space again, whereas NOT doing so will cost me weeks in debugging and reorganisation.)

Now, assuming your IT management is about as sensical as mine, the solution is (probably - we don't really have enough info to be sure) to fork prior to doing the heavy work, and then exit the subprocess when it's done. The subprocess' memory will be freed, but the parent will continue to live and monitor. It's probably the cheapest approach to the problem.

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