Comment by lholden

Most people think of swap as "emergency memory in case I run out of memory" and while it's true that it can get used in this way, it usually serves a much more critical purpose in your OS's ability to reason about and use memory.

For a good article on why this is true for Linux: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

I believe that most operating systems are going to make use of memory in a similar manner.

With that said, I'll turn off swap on devices that have unreliable storage. (Anything using an SD card)