Occasionally very high CPU load

You often still need swap even with what should be more than enough memory. I think because processes see that more ram is available and they take it and when more RAM is needed it’s not available to other processes.

It does, but only if you have 2GB or less.

He likely did follow the standard install. It’s unclear why he’s running out of ram, but that’s the case. There’s some chance that adding actual RAM will solve the problem.