[Balinares]

Another factor other commenters haven't mentioned, although the article does bring it up: you may disable swap and you will still get paging behavior regardless, because in a pinch the kernel will reclaim pages that are mmapped to files. Most typically binaries and librairies. Which means the process in question will incur a map page read next time it schedules. But of course you're out of memory, so the kernel will need to page out another process's code page to make room, and when that process next schedules... Etc.

This has far worse degradation behavior than normal swapping of regular data pages. That at least gives you the breathing space to still schedule processes when under memory pressure, such as whichever OOM killer you favor.

[man8alexd]

Binaries and libraries are not paged out. Being read-only, they are simply discarded from the memory. And I'll repeat, actively used executable pages are explicitly excluded from reclaim and never discarded.