[CentOS] Manual OOM killing?

From: Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com>

> Yesterday I had one of my scientists kill one of my servers when his
> program ran amok and gobbled up all the memory, or forked too many
> processes, or I'm just not exactly sure what to be honest.
> 
> Is there something I can run manually in cron to look for rampant
> programs and kill them?   I know that may be hard to discern but I
> could also include a list if "known good" programs not to kill, as
> well as a list of "known suspect" user IDs

What about setting limits...?
/etc/security/limits.conf

JD