What would be a few reasons to limit the subsearch maxout setting in the join stanza instead of letting the memory constraint be the limiting factor?

[mschellhouse]

We are discussing the subsearch_max configuration setting in limits.conf internally and trying to better understand the benefit to setting a limit? It seems as though the better constraint is search memory mgt as I can use various tuning options ("fields" command immediately comes to mind) to limit the size of subsearch but be over some arbitrary numeric threshold.

[valiquet]

To be able to predict and to now when you will reach or reached the limit.