[rcxdude]

It's one of the reasons why running without swap can have even worse pathological behaviour than running with swap. With swap the kernel can prioritise keeping code in RAM over little-used data, wheras without it when RAM fills up with data eventually the currently running hot code gets swapped out and performance completely tanks, meaning the system doesn't actually hit the nice OOM error you hope it would. (hence userspace utilities like earlyoom to kick in before the kernel's absolute last resort strategy).