It's not always about performance. Years ago while traveling I installed Linux to a flash drive to carry my entire OS, apps, and data with me. While I did backu

It's not always about performance. Years ago while traveling I installed Linux to a flash drive to carry my entire OS, apps, and data with me. While I did backup often, I was well aware of the danger that excessive write wear posed in killing my stick, so swap was disabled. To this very day and for the same reason, my Pi also has swap disabled. As a result, I've encountered this flaw the Linux kernel design multiple times. And it is a flaw, as you only have to do the same test on Windows to see how an OS should behave when you run out of RAM: a hiccup followed by your offending tab being terminated by the OOM killer. Locking up the system for 10 min. is just not acceptable.