They presented one reason: the system will swap out more or less unused memory and give that much more space for disk cache, etc. Now, I'm not sure I find this

They presented one reason: the system will swap out more or less unused memory and give that much more space for disk cache, etc. Now, I'm not sure I find this a particularly compelling reason. I suppose it depends on how much RAM you have available for cache vs how much unused junk gets swapped out. If you've got 5G of unused RAM and 300M extra of stale allocations that get swapped out, then it's probably not going to impact your system in any measurable way. I personally like a quick OOM, myself, rather than a machine slowing down to a crawl for multiple minutes while swap gets exhausted.