> On SSDs, swapping out anonymous pages and reclaiming file pages are essentially equivalent in terms of performance/latency
…but very much not equivalent in terms of how much you are wearing out your SSD.
> Swap can make a system slower to OOM kill
This is almost always actually a bad thing. Turning on swap means your system goes from randomly killing processes to suddenly running 100x slower than it used to and then randomly killing processes.
Yeah, but in the meantime you might actually notice that your system is slowing down, investigate and possibly fix the issue or intelligently kill the right process.
"The oom-killer generally has a bad reputation among Linux users. This may be part of the reason Linux invokes it only when it has absolutely no other choice. It will swap out the desktop environment, drop the whole page cache and empty every buffer before it will ultimately kill a process. At least that's what I think that it will do. I have yet to be patient enough to wait for it, sitting in front of an unresponsive system."