Rewriting the tests shouldn't block this specific issue, no. Also, don't use multiprocessing for it. I would just use subprocess to start a separate process (which might after all be OOM-killed,) check the exitcode, and record its stderr in case of failure. Given that Steve ran the bigmem tests with a high limit and they all passed means that it's not pressing, though -- while it would be *good* to make these tests easier, and the skips more obvious, it's a good sign that nothing broke :)