The magic of swap means you can leave those applications open and as long as they're idle they'll just quietly wait for you on disk until you've finished your LLM adventure.
On many modern systems swap is quite small and not large enough to hold the entire system. For a 32GB machine, Ubuntu recommends 6GB and redhat recommends 6.4GB (20%). In a VM that number is much much lower. Besides, some libraries allocate memory in such way that you get artificial memory spikes in physical memory.
I know this because I spent this weekend debugging crashes in an LLM pipeline :(
