If you have a lot of physical memory, you may want to reduce your swappiness to increase performance. The performance is boosted as the kernel can cache data in memory for faster access and reduce the amount of data being swapped in and out of the swap space.
Alternatively, if you have very little memory (For example: 256MB or below), you may want to increase swappiness to boost performance.
To change the swappiness, You have to edit the /etc/sysctl.conf. /etc/sysctl.conf is a file tocontain sysctl which configure kernel parameters at runtime.
# vim /etc/sysctl.conf
At the bottom of the file /etc/sysctl.conf, add the following parameters
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vm.swappiness=5
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Reboot and you will notice the difference. You may want to use conky to monitor the memory/swap usages
