This HN comment and the linked post brought up a lot of good points. The main takeaway is that swap should primarily be considered a mechanism for equality of reclamation, not for emergency extra memory, where equality of reclamation means file-backed pages and anonymous pages are subject to similar criteria for being evicted from physical memory.
I used to have zero swap on my Linux desktop and this convinced me to add at least a small swap partition.
This HN comment and the linked post brought up a lot of good points. The main takeaway is that swap should primarily be considered a mechanism for equality of reclamation, not for emergency extra memory, where equality of reclamation means file-backed pages and anonymous pages are subject to similar criteria for being evicted from physical memory.
I used to have zero swap on my Linux desktop and this convinced me to add at least a small swap partition.