It's pretty clear the OP is talking about swapping, not paging or virtual memory.
The original poster is talking about “page swapping”, sometimes called “paging”, and less often called “swapping”. “Swapping” is the least-preferred term because of its ambiguity—its meaning has changed throughout history and even today, though it has become more synonymous with “paging”, it can still refer to many other things.
As for the original poster’s question, there is no need to cover the issues regarding paging and no more need to explain that he or she is not referring to virtual memory.
There is only question that has not been answered.
Has anyone heard of any OSes where paging can be disabled?
iOS devices have no paging system, although they have virtual memory.
You can play around with it if the above replies have not yet convinced you that it is a horrible mistake not to have paging, but the end result is that you will run out of memory and crash faster than you can sing “American Pie” 20,000 times.
iOS devices are unforgiving in terms of memory for this very reason. It is extremely easy to exhaust and fragment the memory to the point where allocations fail.
The moral of the story is that paging is a good thing. I personally prefer a little stutter and a little waiting over a full crash, because that is the only alternative to paging.
L. Spiro
