Swap isn’t just used in OOM situations anymore, it’s also used for reorganization of live RAM, and anything that uses free-on-request cache RAM (ZFS comes to mind but I’m sure plenty of other stuff might be using it, like web browsers) is probably able to access large contiguous blocks because memory management is constantly reorganizing and freeing up contiguous heap.
Turning off swap is a bad idea unless you have a server and it’s running a single application and even then it’s probably not advisable in 2026.
Swap isn’t just used in OOM situations anymore, it’s also used for reorganization of live RAM, and anything that uses free-on-request cache RAM (ZFS comes to mind but I’m sure plenty of other stuff might be using it, like web browsers) is probably able to access large contiguous blocks because memory management is constantly reorganizing and freeing up contiguous heap.
Turning off swap is a bad idea unless you have a server and it’s running a single application and even then it’s probably not advisable in 2026.