[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.