[jeremycole]

Yes, they are two distinct issues which are somewhat conflated: the actual "swap insanity" and swap in general, and NUMA performance effects. I think for my purposes, the negative effects of NUMA are relatively hidden, so we only see the side effects. That is, it's impossible to know at this point whether optimization for NUMA would help MySQL, since no one has made a serious effort to do it.

I suspect it would help quite a bit, if done right, and for the right query workload.