> Under temporary spikes in memory usage > With swap: We’re more resilient to temporary spikes, but in cases of severe memory starvation, the period from memory thrashing beginning to the OOM killer may be prolonged. We have more visibility into the instigators of memory pressure and can act on them more reasonably, and can perform a controlled intervention.

Somehow that doesn't resonate with my experience. I tend to remember the cases where I can't even SSH into the box, because the fork in sshd takes minutes, as does spawning the login shell.

I'd really like some way to have swap, but still loosen the OOM killer on the biggest memory hog when the system slows down to a crawl. I haven't found that magic configuration yet.