"swap" partition leads to instability?

[jb]

RW <rwmaillists <at> googlemail.com> writes:

> ... 
> > Yes, there is some confusion about the diff, if any, between paging
> > and swapping.
> > 
> > Paging - copying or moving pages between physical memory (RAM) and
> > secondary storage (e.g. hard disk), in both directions.
> > Swapping - nowdays is synonymous with "paging".
> >   But its history is as follows (per Wikipedia):
> 
> This is a bit Linux-centric.
> ...
> You page-out pages and swap-out processes. 
> 
> When FreeBSD is very short of memory it swaps-out entire processes to
> concentrate the memory in the running processes. Linux goes directly
> from paging to killing processes.

That was helpful - knowing the details of VMM implementation in various OSs
helps understand the generalizations, with exceptions ...
jb