it was a throwback down the memory lane and the years before my first Linux in 1995 i had been dealing with Windows where configuration of swap was "configuring

it was a throwback down the memory lane and the years before my first Linux in 1995 i had been dealing with Windows where configuration of swap was "configuring virtual memory", so i automatically used that term. > If you actually hit swap the system effectively deadlocks anyway that depends. In many cases in the past the options would be either with swap and thus slow or pretty much not at all. And again these days there is so much memory that there is always a way to avoid the swapping. Though i've met funny situations in recent years like when a several terabyte sized database process would get killed by the OOMKiller on a machine with overcommit left on and no swap configured.