Ele respondeu com muita clareza em outro Q no superusuário .
Citações:
"In the fallowing scenario:
have multiple tabs opened in Chrome, and don't use it for a while
have many opened applications that trigger windows to send unused applications to swap file (run out of memory)
When you return to Chrome, you will feel each tab recovering from swap slowdown. In other applications you will be delayed only once.
You could call it a performance issue, but it's only a side-effect of the different process architecture."