[flomo]

On a few occasions, Safari has claimed gigabytes of memory and caused my machine to start thrashing the swap. In that case, the correct answer is to restart Safari, not take a refresher course on virtual memory allocation.

Windows Vista had an issue where copying large files would set off such a huge swap-storm that OS became completely unresponsive for several minutes. People gave all the same VM excuses then as well, but there obviously was something wrong.

[scott_s]

Those aren't excuses, those are reasons: copying large files are the pathological case for just about all caching techniques. You've now kicked out everything useful from your cache with something that you will never use again. It has little to do with virtual memory itself.