[rcxdude]

When I reenabled swap on my desktop (after running without swap for years assuming it would avoid the death spiral, only to find out it was almost always worse because there was no spiral: it just froze the whole system almost immediately), it would frequently hold about 25% of my RAM capacity with the system working perfectly fine (this is probably an indication of the amount of memory many desktop apps hold onto without actually using more than anything else, but it was useful). In my experience if you want a quick kill in low memory you need to run something like earlyoom to kill the offending process before the kernel desperately tries to keep things running by swapping out code pages and slowing the system to a crawl.