[throwawaaarrgh]

I'm sorry, but you don't understand swap. It's useful to retain all kinds of memory in different scenarios, like cache, or windows that haven't been accessed in a while. It can free up fast memory, reducing contention and speeding up the system. And you can control snappiness to decide what and when things get swapped.

Swap is also used by the system's hibernate function to store a copy of RAM to disk.

If you have 64GB of RAM and no combination of your apps, cache, etc will ever approach that, then probably nothing will ever swap. But for more limited systems or when running apps with higher memory pressure, swap does increase system performance.

[AnotherGoodName]

Even in the 64gb case you're still losing out since the OS will use free memory as file cache.

No swap just means you think everything ever allocated should always stay in ram. In pretty much every system there's going to be a few GB that were allocated but never really needed. I'd rather that not be true but since it is I'd like that stuff paged out to give the os more file cache.

[donkeybeer]

I don't know how representative firefox hardware survey would be of the general population, but https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

4 and 8 gb ram seem still most common.