There are plenty of one-off tasks that can cause a short, transient memory need. Killing anything due to this is generally a bad idea. As an example: I run a s

There are plenty of one-off tasks that can cause a short, transient memory need. Killing anything due to this is generally a bad idea. As an example: I run a small Hetzner cloud instance (for about $4.50/month) for quick prototyping when I am away from home. It has a nowadays-considered-wimpy 2GB of RAM. It also exposes a Jupyter server that I (or friends) can use for quick experiments from anywhere in the world. Some time ago I added torch and torchvision modules for a quick size comparison on a couple of models (just number of trainable parameters) and "pip install torch" got OOM-killed before I realized that I have zero swap and added it (and could have deleted it after the install). This is not a common example, but a general observation that while using swap in the production servers, running one thing in a highly predictable fashion (uhm, sure) might mask the problem you want to expose, swap is extremely useful for general-purpose computers that occasionally run things that cause memory use spikes and are not particularly sensitive on whether they take a few milliseconds or a few seconds. My 2c.