Swap is there an emergency relief for when a runaway process starts to eat all the resources. The system gets slow the user says hey what’s that? They look and see oh wow this one process is really eating a lot of resources that’s bad, can I kill it or do I need to gracefully try to shut it down. Swap buys you time when it could matter. When you don’t have swap OOM killer takes out whatever it wants and for a desktop user that may not be that big of a deal but for a server the database is likely the first target that is taken out.
you misunderstand the meme (of course it doesn’t help either); because the alternative isn’t “no swap”, but rather “use a swap file instead of swap partition”
Swap is there an emergency relief for when a runaway process starts to eat all the resources. The system gets slow the user says hey what’s that? They look and see oh wow this one process is really eating a lot of resources that’s bad, can I kill it or do I need to gracefully try to shut it down. Swap buys you time when it could matter. When you don’t have swap OOM killer takes out whatever it wants and for a desktop user that may not be that big of a deal but for a server the database is likely the first target that is taken out.
you misunderstand the meme (of course it doesn’t help either); because the alternative isn’t “no swap”, but rather “use a swap file instead of swap partition”