On many modern systems swap is quite small and not large enough to hold the entire system. For a 32GB machine, Ubuntu recommends 6GB and redhat recommends 6.4GB

On many modern systems swap is quite small and not large enough to hold the entire system. For a 32GB machine, Ubuntu recommends 6GB and redhat recommends 6.4GB (20%). In a VM that number is much much lower. Besides, some libraries allocate memory in such way that you get artificial memory spikes in physical memory. I know this because I spent this weekend debugging crashes in an LLM pipeline :(