[mort96]

There have been times when I have needed to do something which requires more memory than is physically available on the machine. Without swap, those tasks would have been literally impossible to do without upgrading the machine. With swap, it just takes a little longer - but still much shorter than it would take to order more RAM sticks.

One of those times was on a 512MB RAM VPS, where I needed to compile something - you don't want a 512MB VPS to do a lot of compilation, but in that one instance, I was very glad I could easily just make a swap file and get on with it. The other time was on my laptop with 8 GB of RAM.

Also, even ignoring the times where swap makes possible a task which would otherwise have been impossible, you flat out ignored the content of the article. Did you even read it? If you have a long running task which allocates a lot of memory, then proceeds to only very rarely use that memory (or maybe it only needs that memory when it shuts down, or just forgot to free that memory), swap allows the system to swap out that memory and instead do something useful with it, like caching files or not killing processes. It doesn't matter that the disk is slower than RAM, if the swapped-out memory is rarely or never accessed.

[b4lancesh33t]

Well, they wouldn't have been literally impossible. Anything that can be done with swap can be done by writing the data to disk and then reading it back. That's all swap is doing.

[mort96]

Ok, you are technically correct; I _could_ have changed GCC to cache stuff to disk instead of keeping everything in RAM (which would probably have been a big refactor), but I think we both know that's not really practical.