i run on 256mb ram and i leave the swappiness at it's default, which is what works best, i tune else where, the thing i've learned about swap is it works best when you don't mess with it. for example that's say you lower swappiness to the usual 10, which keeps more programs in ram and uses swap less, all of a sudden you use a big program, say open office for example, so now it starts swapping to make room, so get you the slow down while it does it's thing.
now flip, that's say we increase swappiness to say 100, now you get these little pockets of wait time cause it's retrieving from the swap on the hard drive which is slower than ram, because you've asked it to put as much there as it can.
the best way to get performance is to fine tune the setup, for example turning on reduced resources in metacity, changing the programs to lighter alternatives, example swap gedit for leafpad, use simple themes, turn off any animations, don't use truetype fonts, use bitmap fonts(times, helvetica, courier), turn off smoothing and hinting, etc...
there's more you can tweak on the ui end that will give you faster, better results than trying to tweak how the hardware is used.
just my 2 cents, hope that's understandable i'm kind of tired.
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