Right. Think of the swap space as a spare wheel. It is commonly lighter/weaker than the "active" wheels, because you don't use it. If are are using it, go to the next garage!

Well the analogy has a hitch. With the explosion of memory size, measured in GB nowadays, it is OK to run Linux completely without swap space. Monitor the memory usage of a busy Moodle server and you'll see. There are too many tools, munin generates a detailed graph.