I have a pretty old, slow laptop on which I've been running Gentoo for a long time, so I'm frequently recompiling a lot of software. Over the years, as software has gone from being bloated to being insanely bloated (qt-webkit, firefox, and rust: I'm looking at you!), the "only" 8 gigs of memory that my system has just sometimes isn't enough, so adding swap has let me stretch the life of my system.
Sure, huge compiles are much slower when they hit swap, but at least it's possible to run them with swap, while it would be impossible for me to do so without.. at least until I can afford to get a new computer which can fit more memory.
Sure, huge compiles are much slower when they hit swap, but at least it's possible to run them with swap, while it would be impossible for me to do so without.. at least until I can afford to get a new computer which can fit more memory.