Linux – Force swapping of certain stopped processes

My suggestion is setting your swappiness to 0.

Setting your swappiness to a "lower number" may reduce the "frequency" of using swap, but setting it to 0 will force the kernel down a different code path, forcing all memory allocation to first use up all available memory and cache before using swap space.

You can set swappiness to zero by issuing the following:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

OOM doesn't necessarily kill the process you think it will. Read about it here: http://lwn.net/Articles/317814/

I suspect what is happening is that because chrome uses a different process for each page, it's confusing the OOM-killer's heuristics and other processes are being killed rather than the parent chrome process.

According to this, the OOM-killer likes to kill niced processes. So try setting chrome to a niceness of greater than 0.. might make it more of a target :-)