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Classic swap fail. A good rule of thumb is that when a swapping OS runs out of RAM it literally cannot swap its way back to stability unless you kill some of the tasks.

Faster drives help a little, but the most practical option is to have enough RAM to use no swap at all.

I have a 64GB Mac and I'm regularly over 32GB. If I only had 32GB my ten core Mac would still grind to a halt.

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The RAM usage on Mac is a little misleading I think. If you have lots of free RAM it will aggressively start caching stuff that could easily be offloaded if memory pressure were to increase.

That's why they promote memory pressure as a metric. Generally bad things start to happen once the graph goes into the red.

Swap helps for some use cases - the most common one being having two large programs, but only using one at a time. Imagine having Photoshop and Illustrator both open, both using 6GB of RAM on an 8GB machine - if you're only using Photoshop then the OS can swap out Illustrator's RAM to make room - but if you're actively using both that won't work.

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