[leoc]

I'd be more convinced by the argument that swap shouldn't be thought of as slow RAM if the author addressed the fact that it's generally known as 'virtual memory'—and it has been since at least System 370, so it's not simply a later misconception: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~stjones/proj/vm_reading/ibmrd2505M... . Instead the article just omits the term 'virtual memory' completely, and pretty conspicuously.

I also think that a convincing case for swap would have to discuss the concepts of latency, interactivity, and (soft) real-time performance, things that largely weren't to the fore in the salad days of the 370 family or the VAX. Virtual memory is the TCP of local storage.

[JdeBP]

That is not the argument.

The article actually says, four times over, that it should not be thought of as emergency memory. It's not emergency memory; it's ordinary memory that should see use as part of an everyday memory hierarchy.

And if you are going to question the terminology, the elephant in the room that you have missed is calling paging swapping. (-:

[leoc]

Despite the repeated use of the word 'emergency' this is not quite obvious. For example in

> many people just see it as a kind of “slow extra memory” for use in emergencies

the scare quotes are around 'slow extra memory' not 'emergencies'. Now granted in the last bullet point of the conclusion it affirms that VM is a source of slow memory, but earlier it uses 'memory' where it's referring specifically to RAM, for example

> Without swap: Anonymous pages are locked into memory as they have nowhere to go.

Really the main reason my original comment was rubbsih is that I took the article far too much as a general discussion of swap when, as it said, it's largely about how much swap to enable on a given Linux system running some already-determined software.