At least in my experience, 99% of the time that I run out of physical RAM, it's because of some runaway process that's gobbling up as much as it can for no real

At least in my experience, 99% of the time that I run out of physical RAM, it's because of some runaway process that's gobbling up as much as it can for no real gain, or otherwise attempting to perform a computation that could only complete with an astronomical amount of memory. After the offending process is killed, every other useful process has had all its memory swapped out, since the offending process was so urgent in its requests for memory. Then, since the system is so lazy at swapping memory back in, each process has degraded performance for the next several minutes of usage. So as an ultimate fix, I have a shell script on each of my machines that does "swapoff -a; swapon -a" to swap everything back within a minute. My own experience makes me wonder, what RAM configurations are people running where they reportedly find swap so useful? Is everyone else running so many useful applications simultaneously that they use almost all their RAM?