[bhouston]

On windows I have found it necessary to disable swap to keep myself efficient. Many times Ive had applications decide to allocate massive amounts of memory and then it leads to my system slowing down with tons of swap activity. In nearly all cases, I didn't want my system to try its best to handle these massive memory requests but rather it should have just killed the offending application. Often in these failure scenarios the swap goes nuts and my computer becomes unresponsive that it takes a long time to even get to kill the bad actor.

Thus I disabled swap and I never had these unresponsive issues. I run with 32GB of ram so generally well behaved applications never run into memory issues.

Some applications that would cause issues would be too many VirtualBox instances that use more than available memory. A text editor that chocks trying to open a >1GB text file (looking at you, the new JS-based editors.)

[maxxxxx]

Windows is terrible at swapping. As soon as you hit max RAM performance suffers a lot. Even if you never use inactive apps.

[mnx]

Yep. When I was using win7 with 2gb of ram, I was basically managing it manually - as soon as memory usage hit 90-95%,I was shutting apps down. If I let it swap, it would often hang completely.