Reminds me of the standard recipe for a memory subsystem excerciser in perl.
Basically only tests ulimit, and the efficiency of your operating system's out of memory performance. and as all these things are, use with extreme caution on systems that you don't admin.
I've used it to clean ram up so that performance tests that need a cold buffer cache have some free ram to work with.

perl -e ' while (1) { $x .= " " x 1024 };'
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--
Jay "Yohimbe" Thorne, alpha geek for UserFriendly