In the latest version of the proc filesystem the OOMKiller has had some adjustments.  The valid range is now -1000 to +1000; previously it was -16 to +15 with a special score of -17 to outright disable it.  It also now uses /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj instead of /proc/<pid>/oom_adj.  You can read the finer details here.

Given that, systemd now includes OOMScoreAdjust specifically for altering this.  To fully disable OOMKiller on a service simply add OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 directly underneath a [Service] definition, as follows.

...
[Service]
OOMScoreAdjust=-1000
...

This score can be adjusted if you want to ensure the parent PID lives, but children processes can be safely reaped by setting it to something like -999, then if “/bin/parent”, has “/bin/parent –memory-hungry-child,” it will be killed first.

If you have a third-party daemon (like Datadog, used in this example below) which manages itself and uses a sysvinit script you can still calm…