https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html This post is also available in Japanese , Chinese , and Russian . tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve. Swap is not generally about getting emergency memory, it's about making memory reclamation egalitarian and efficient. In fact, using it as "emergency memory" is generally actively harmful. Disabling swap does not prevent disk I/O from becoming a problem under memory contention, it simply shifts the disk I/O thrashing from anonymous pages to file pages. Not only may this be less efficient, as we have a smaller pool of pages to select from for reclaim, but it may also contribute to getting into this high contention state in the first place. The swapper on kernels before 4.0 has a lot of pitfalls, and has contributed to a lot of people's negative perceptions about swap due to its overeagerness to swap out ...