I second this. It's a big enough issue for me that if Mavericks doesn't fix it, I'll be switching back to Linux.

On my previous '09 MBP with a 5400rpm drive disabling the pager meant it went from a really slow crappy experience to amazingly fast. I had periodic hangs when I used too much memory, but I would put up with those to have general performance not suck.

I eventually bought a 2012 Air (got sick of carting a 17" laptop around) and so haven't seen any issues (yay for ssd!).

Looking forward to seeing if this is fixed - I've always found page management decisions made by OSX to be less awesome than linux.