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As noted in a comment, if you don't have enough memory, swapoff will result in "out of memory" errors and on the kernel killing processes to recover RAM.
Explaining this further, if you don't have enough available RAM swapoff will result in out of memory errors and the kernel will start killing processes to recover some. Use this with caution. – bahamatAug 14 '12 at 9:15
Better hope so; linux behaves pretty hilariously when you run out of memory with no active swap at all... – ShadurAug 14 '12 at 9:19