Adding 32GB of RAM is vastly better than adding 32GB of swap, it’s not even close. However, it’s also vastly more expensive. That has always been the case, not

Adding 32GB of RAM is vastly better than adding 32GB of swap, it’s not even close. However, it’s also vastly more expensive. That has always been the case, not just in the current insane situation. We use swap because we have plenty of disk space, but (comparably) very little DRAM. The same goes for another level on the hierarchy: If you could choose between 1GB of DRAM vs. 1GB of SRAM (which your CPU cache is), you’d definitely choose the SRAM. But you’d be paying out of your nose both with money and area, it’s not economical at all. My CPU has 96MB of cache, and that’s considered massive.