Comment 296 for bug 131094

There's a tunable parameter called 'swappiness' that determines whether pages of memory are swapped out to hard disk in lieu of using the memory for buffers or not. A value of 0 means memory pages will never be swapped out in favor of buffers. A value of 100 is the opposite. The default value in the kernel is 60. I would be interested to know if anyone sees desktop responsiveness improve if the value is lowered.

Theoretically, if you lower the value your desktop applications should respond better as you switch between them or on return after leaving the machine for a period of time. However, if you are doing a large amount of data transfers or other intensive tasks you may see a drop in overall performance. For a desktop system, many users prefer responsiveness over a small drop in performance.

Please see this page for more details, an overview of what you may expect if you decrease or increase the value, and how to change the value: http://www.pythian.com/news/1913/

Thanks