[lmm]

I understand google solves that problem by not enabling swap on their servers.

[gohrt]

That's rather common. If swapping can harm your application, than don't swap. On a machine where slowdown is tolerable (temporarily, on a desktop), swap is fine. On a machine whose entire purpose is to serve as a fast cache in front of slow storage, swapoff and fall back to shedding or queuing requests at the frontend.

[mh-]

Without any specific knowledge of Google's practices, I can say this is certainly true - this is standard nowadays.