Only my TAM and PowerBook 1400 use VM (actually RAM Doubler) because both of them are severely RAM-impaired; the TAM is limited to 128MB and the 1400 to 64MB, so they need all the help they can get.

But all my other OS 9 systems are crammed with physical RAM and VM is turned off, and as you saw, it makes a massive difference in performance to run everything out of memory. Sadly, there is no easy and safe way to do this with OS X. +1 to Classic.