Memory over usage is a standard? Really?

So we’ve finally transitioned over to our new host, EngineYard, and we ran in to some slight snags.  One of them being that our mongrels are overly hungry for memory.  I come from the C++ / C# world so normally I think the solution is to go straight to profiling tools and figure out what’s going on.  However I was presented with a different solution for our problem that I guess is fine, it just is not something I’m used to.  That is, when a mongrel becomes to large, simple kill it.  Why not?  So if we have a mongrel that gets out of hand there are a variety of different tools configured on our site that will tell it to die and bring up a new one .. and many people do this .. so problem solved? :-/