I don't understand how swap helps when you already have enough memory though. The article seems to say it's important to be able to swap out anonymous pages, but why? Especially when you aren't under memory contention? Just because memory isn't needed yet doesn't mean it's a benefit to get rid of it. It takes time to swap it to disk and then time to get it back. Why is that so important? Why would the kernel turn off things like compression otherwise? Makes no sense to me. No swap = punish the user by being less efficient on purpose? That's no argument for swap at all.