I use a swap file these days because in the 4 years since I purchased my computers I went from never hitting 32gigs of memory used at the same time, to hitting

I use a swap file these days because in the 4 years since I purchased my computers I went from never hitting 32gigs of memory used at the same time, to hitting it once a week. The worst offenders are browsers and the JVM. The swap file saves me from those 20 seconds of distraction when running a variable memory workload that suddenly jumps over the limit and hardlocks the computer for hours on end. If I was doing something important I will wait for OOM killer to maybe reap the evil children, but otherwise I just power cycle the system and add a note to put the swap file in fstab.