> If an OS+apps' working set exceeds RAM, performance will slow to a crawl in any case That sounds like a misunderstanding how memory is allocated and this may

> If an OS+apps' working set exceeds RAM, performance will slow to a crawl in any case That sounds like a misunderstanding how memory is allocated and this may be the root of it. There are many instances where this would be completely expected. The most trivial perhaps being an application that mmap() a file much larger than memory. That is a perfectly valid thing to do.