What's the other option, though? It gets a fault for a page somewhere, it needs memory, and it has none. You have to evict something. What's your choice if not swap or filesystem-backed pages?
Systems have never operated well under true VM pressure. Not in the 90's, not now. When the working set goes beyond available memory performance falls off a cliff.
And the report in the article doesn't seem to have a good comparison anyway. I mean, do we seriously believe that Windows or OS X can handle this condition (4G, no swap) better? I mean, swap is default for a reason.
Systems have never operated well under true VM pressure. Not in the 90's, not now. When the working set goes beyond available memory performance falls off a cliff.
And the report in the article doesn't seem to have a good comparison anyway. I mean, do we seriously believe that Windows or OS X can handle this condition (4G, no swap) better? I mean, swap is default for a reason.