Modern disks are definitely faster, especially the SSDs. So the problem is less these days than before. But it all still boils down to RAM being faster than di

Modern disks are definitely faster, especially the SSDs. So the problem is less these days than before. But it all still boils down to RAM being faster than disks overall, so the more RAM you can use, the less use you have to make of disks. An analogy of RAM and swap, is that RAM is your workbench for cooking and swap is the cupboards in your kitchen. If you have enough workbench in the kitchen, you can leave all of your ingredients out all the time while you are making that dish. If you don't have enough workbench, you have to keep stopping and put some stuff away in the cupboard before you can grab some other stuff that's in the cupboard to put it on the workbench so that you can continue your job. The old saying in the old days when hardware was extremely expensive (Not that RAM wasn't!) was "The quickest way to speed up a slow computer was throw as much RAM as you could afford at it." Same old workbench and cupboard idea.