[wbkang]

This is the correct answer that needs to be at the top. No swap doesn't mean OOM killer magically kicks in earlier. It just means the anonymous memory has no where to go and your executable pages get evicted and then you are really hosed.

[more_corn]

And the machine crashes which in production environments is far preferable to dog slow.

[blueflow]

Unfortunately no crash. This is the dog slow case. Too slow for an SSH session to be able to start. But the machine might catch itself and get back onto tracks without an OOM happening.