Comment by keyringlight

Another aspect I'd wonder about for relatively simple tasks is just freeing it from memory and being prepared to pay the cost of loading it again, it's probably already on disk. Latency matters, but it seems there will be limits especially considering the transfer speed and latency improvements we've seen to storage commonly installed in most systems over the past 15 years or so.

Then comes the challenge of deciding what processes/data to free or page, whether that's flagged by the system as it's running or at coding/compile time. And that seems similar to the issue of picking a swap strategy for a distro/OS, which will depend on the user's demands or system, setting a good default and exposing how to change the configuration to a better match if needed.