nisa parent
crash as in it's not recoverable using ssh - machine only responds to ping and needs a hard reset.
Which is exactly the situation you never, ever want a server in. So it’s actually worse than a “crash”
Me and my team removed swap on tens of thousands of machines cause we were sick of dealing with this. We wanted the machines to fail hard and fast and not go into a state where it’s doing only a minuscule amount of actual work while trying to recover.
And I think that, sadly, it's not even a full solution, because linux can manage to get thrashing even without swap. It pages in and out things like memory mapped files or the content of executables of stopped processes. See for instance:
https://serverfault.com/questions/898388/how-to-prevent-kern...