Your theory is correct, but as usual, the difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory. When a workload runs out of RAM, it ofte

Your theory is correct, but as usual, the difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory. When a workload runs out of RAM, it often really runs out of RAM, and would just be swapping continuously. It may even run out of swap space, if it was left to run for long enough. In my experience, even with NVMe drives, it just wasn't worth it because it usually wouldn't be able to finish in a reasonable amount of time. In part, I'm sure that's because the Linux kernel behaved much worse than is theoretically possible. This may obviously depend on your workload, but I've heard similar sentiments from others (in fact, it was somebody else who suggested disabling swap to me based on their experience). The other point is that a sibling comment mentions some recent kernel changes that may have led to improvements, but I haven't given those a chance.