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Without swap: The OOM killer is triggered more quickly as anonymous pages are locked into memory and cannot be reclaimed.
This is why I prefer no swap on servers. I want oom to kill things quickly, otherwise everything slows to a crawl including ssh and terminal sessions that I’d use to troubleshoot and kill things myself anyway. I have redundant servers so a down system is much less disruptive than a terminally slow system.
My favorite part of this is when I’ve almost won and then a rule that was not included in the summary is explained which makes the entire strategy I was going for inviable.