[scott_s]

As has been stated several times in this thread, the "swappiness" factor is not about over-committing RAM. It's about giving the kernel the freedom to say, "Hey, these pages in RAM have not been used in a long, long time. I'll swap them to disk so I can use that RAM for things that will speed things up more, like disk caching."

This is independent of applications whose working set size exceed that of physical memory.

[edwintorok]

Yeah my reply was to the "disable swap" part of the discussion, not the swappiness one.

[scott_s]

Disabling swap means setting swappiness to 0; I'm not sure how you can talk about "disabling swap" without talking about swappiness.

[edwintorok]

Because that depends on the kernel version, I took the more reliable approach of using 'swapoff -a' (or in fact not defining any swap in my /etc/fstab). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940136

[scott_s]

Which then means that you're not allowing the kernel to make such decisions as what I described. (Rarely used pages paged out to allow for more disk cache.)