I run long-running server processes (web apps, etc) a lot and I keep encountering the situation that many applications will not properly deal with MemoryError exceptions but end up in an unusable state.

From an operational perspective I wish the process in this case would just fail and exit.

I talked to Guido about this general idea at EuroPython2012 and he encouraged me to look into this. 

Here's a patch:
https://bitbucket.org/ctheune/cpython/changeset/323bb572344d46df669d3dbec4431cf6720fc5b4

I think it does what I want it to do, but a) my C knowledge is really bad and b) I'm not sure whether this is the right approach anyway.

I'd appreciate feedback and possibly inclusion in the core.