Linux generally gets very squirrely when it's in a low-memory state. I think it's a bit safer to turn swappiness down and use a small swapfile and/or zram just

Linux generally gets very squirrely when it's in a low-memory state. I think it's a bit safer to turn swappiness down and use a small swapfile and/or zram just to keep it from getting completely bricked up. That way you're sacrificing IO for a few seconds/minutes to intervene.