> OP tries to argue that a long period of thrashing will give you an opportunity for more visibility and controlled intervention.

I didn't get that impression. My read was that OP was arguing for user-space process killers so the system doesn't get to the point where the system becomes unresponsive due to thrashing.

From the article:

> With swap: ... We have more visibility into the instigators of memory pressure and can act on them more reasonably, and can perform a controlled intervention.

But of course if you're doing this kind of monitoring, you can probably just check your processes' memory usage and curb them long before they touch swap.