All of my kernel panics and spinners of death were due to running some Java IDE or XML tool loading up 100MB files and the like (sometimes in-memory parse trees for those sized files can push the heap to multi GB levels).

Were you using a JVM when you ran into the system glitches?

No, the memory-hungry process I was running was reasonably simple C that I'd written myself. It was semi-contrived, reflecting the extreme of an internal use case, but fundamentally I was just moving around/massaging bytes in big, boringly-malloc'd blocks of memory.

I can't swear that there were no Java processes running on the machine at the time, though. And I often have a Windows or Linux VM running in the background.

I stuck an intel SSD in my 2011 mbp, as well as 16gb of ram (it was really really cheap..).

I disabled the pagefile completely, and things are as snappy as ever - I can't think of an application I use that would use up so much ram that I need to page to disk.