[frostiness]

> The situation the author described where the system comes to a halt as memory contents are paged in and out of memory/disk is (subjectively) worse when the only option is for the OOM killer to begin reaping processes everywhere.

This one's interesting since your outcome often depends on what hardware you have. On systems with slow IO, i.e. a slow HDD, it's possible for swapping to make a system entirely unusable for minutes, whereas if swap is disabled the OOM killer is able to kick in and solve the issue in less than a minute. That's the difference between being able to keep most of your work open and none of your work open (because the alternative is being forced to reboot).

[ComputerGuru]

But in the era when spinning rust startup disks were in use everywhere, no app would autosave. I can’t imagine the carnage if MS Word or Excel were just violently killed at the first sign of memory pressure back in the day.

[kaba0]

The “funny” thing is that I can still regularly hit the “sweet” spot where Linux completely freezes with 8GB of rams (with zram) on a fast SSD.. I think the paging logic still has some assumptions that are only true for hard drives, and that put the system into a frenzy - only REISUB works at that point.