worse than it should be

compcache seems to really help about with making progress. Even if you are swapping, it's so fast that you can actually use your system: start new terminals, run top, etc. Even if the task is in an allocation frenzy and ends up OOM-killed, it does so with relatively little disk activity.

I really have a love affair with it compcache---to the point that I have given up all other types of swap and am now married to this single solution. It can also help with large images, especially those that are mostly single color. I imagine those pages compress very, very well...