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    I had something very similar. In all honesty I'm now of the opinion that large swap is a bad idea unless you really need it. By the time you swapped out more than 0.5 GB the system will be unresponsive in you need it back in ram. See unix.stackexchange.com/questions/499485/… for my similar issue Commented Nov 17, 2019 at 20:11
  • To second Phillip, at least if it's an old-style spinning hard disk, I think trying to allow 10G swap leaves way too much room for problems. I use about 2G swap on a laptop HDD, but I like to think I can usually stop things before it actually uses all of that. Thanks for the detailed test you included in this question. I've heard one workaround is to use the nocache wrapper program, e.g. nocache cp .... Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 12:09
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    Thanks you both, specially Philip for the link. I did not expect that "to much swap" can result in this kind of problem. But also I think that 10G is not "way to much" because i actively use the hibernate feature and had sometimes to less space with 4gb of swap. I will continue to test different configurations. Also I have the suspect that this may be a Debian specific (configuration) problem as a Ubuntu based system does not show a similar behavior. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 16:19