Last time I tried running a linux system with zero swap, I ran into huge issues. It would never actually hit the OoM killer, instead it would just lock up whil

Last time I tried running a linux system with zero swap, I ran into huge issues. It would never actually hit the OoM killer, instead it would just lock up while it still technically had a few hundred mb of memory free. From what I can tell, it was stuck in a loop evicting something from cache and then immediately pulling it back in from disk. Everything was technically still running, but the ui wasn't responsive enough for me to even kill a program. Simply adding 200mb of swap would change the behaviour enough that the OoM killer would eventually run.