Unfortunately this is not the smart geek that they are looking for. He's worse than a normal consumer: he's a power user. Note how he's not done any benchmarks at all, he's just insisting that this must be the cause because the handholding Linux distros he's familiar with all use swap partitions, so OS X must just be retarded or something.

Paging is fucked in OS X, but this isn't why.

He focuses entirely on its use of swap files, which is not a problem at all, especially since the middle of the 10.5 betas. Before that, the system would only allocate new swap files and never do compaction or reclamation, so if your filesystem was normally within 10G of being full, it could page its way into filling it, and grind into a performance hell orders of magnitude worse than what he's complaining about (for years I had to reboot every 100 days or so to reclaim swap). Insisting on using fixed swap partitions made sense twenty years ago, but it sure as hell doesn't today as long as you do GC.

Paging on OS X is much higher latency than any other modern unix, but the fault lies with how VM works in the guts of Mach, not some userland configuration trivialities. Chapter 8 of Amit Singh's Mac OS X Internals has details of the implementation but doesn't go too far into why it sucks.