I sometimes write Python programs which are very difficult to determine how much memory it will use before execution. As such, I sometimes invoke a Python program that tries to allocate massive amounts of RAM causing the kernel to heavily swap and degrade the performance of other running processes.

Because of this, I wish to restrict how much memory a Python heap can grow. When the limit is reached, the program can simply crash. What's the best way to do this? 

If it matters, much code is written in Cython, so it should take into account memory allocated there. I am not married to a pure Python solution (it does not need to be portable), so anything that works on Linux is fine.