cgroups to limit memory (e.g. prevent swap freezes)

[jhon987]

So I read that one could use cgroups in order to avoid system freezes due to swapping run away memory usage (https://superuser.com/questions/1115983/prevent-system-freeze-unresponsiveness-due-to-swapping-run-away-memory-usage) - is that true?

If so, can someone please explain how to apply it on Gentoo because the example in the guide (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC/CGroups) is a bit unclear to me.
On my case, freezes occur upon emerging large packages: chromium, clang, etc... According to TOP the process that hogs all the RAM is cc1plus,
so had I wanted to avoid swap and freeze what values should I be inserting here:
rc_cgroup_${CONTROLLER_NAME}="${CONTROLLER_NAME}.${OPTION_NAME} ${OPTION VALUE}"

Would this be OK:
rc_cgroup_memory="memory.max 8132972 pids.max max" (note the memory units I used is KiB should I use bytes?)

Or, am I completely off track?

[bunder]

I've never used the memory controller myself, but maybe these could help...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/memory.txt
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt

[jhon987]

Yeah, tnx.
I bumped into that documentation, but was hoping someone could shorten things for me, I guess not...

Well, time to dig into that ugly doc, man, it look so windows 93 style with that grey background.

Still, any straightforward answers would be appreciated (i.e. answers that don't redirect me to another resource).