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Any tips on measuring the impact of not having swap? I never use it on my machines for similar reasons.

Worst thing that's ever happened to me is having processes randomly killed by the OOM killer. Could be unpleasant if you're writing an email or document that suddenly disappears because your app got killed.

The OOM killer usually kills the process that's using the most memory, which is the reason the system is OOM. Sometimes this can be adjusted. When I'm OOM it's almost always because some runaway loop used 50GB and it makes no sense to kill any other process.

If it's killing your email editor then your email editor is bloated or you just need more RAM - or swap.

Web browsers are most people's email editor.. and yes those things do use a lot of RAM.

It highly depends on your specific workload, but freeing up RAM by paging out rarely or downright unused pages to swap can definitely give a performance advantage.

In consequence, I always give swap. Even on the off-chance it ends up unused, disk space is orders of magnitude cheaper than RAM, so I don't mind sacrificing it for potential gains.

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