Setting this value to 0 will tell the system to avoid writing anything to swap if at all possible, and a value of 100 will have your system almost immediately write out your memory to a swap file.

The default on Ubuntu and most other Linux systems is 60. If you don’t have more than 1GB of RAM I would not recommend altering this value. On my workstations with 2GB of RAM or more I usually go 10 or 0.

To set the swappiness value:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

To make the change stick after reboots, edit /etc/sysctl.conf with your favorite editor, and add the line “vm.swappiness=10″ if it does not already exist.