[andreasvc]

This is what I suspect, but in practice it seems not a good idea to just turn off swap:

> DO NOT TURN OFF SWAP to prevent this. Your box will crawl, kswapd will chew up a lot of the processor, Linux needs swap enabled, lets just hope its not used.

(from one of the blogs linked in the article).

However, I can't find a clear explanation of why this is so.

[lawnchair_larry]

That was an old bug. It is perfectly fine to disable swap completely. It's the first thing we do on our servers, partly due to the issues detailed in this blog post, and partly due to it being archaic and useless when you have 128GB-512GB of ram.