@qwertydotplus@mastodon.social The second set of things are much cleverer. When your paging rate becomes high you start moving to a more swap like behaviour. You target paging in from a small set of tasks and paging out others, when they have made some progress (actual CPU time doing useful work) you move onto the next ones. This sharply reduces the percentage of time the machine spends thrashing at the expense of responsiveness. In classic (8MB RAM) days you simply switched from paging to swapping.