[phire]

I actually did this on a old laptop, setup 200mb of swap for 4gb of ram.

And it caused huge problems for me, would run out of swap while having plenty of free memory and then go cripplingly slow.

[inamberclad]

Set the swappiness lower.

[AstralStorm]

That only delays the inevitable. Try setting overcommit to 2 and ratio to 100, then note apps crashing.

[tmyklebu]

It doesn't go lower than 0. Swapping can still hose your machine when swappiness is set to 0.