"Con Kolivas strikes again, this time with a patch that regulates the VM subsystem's 'swappiness' on-the-fly, depending on the percent of RAM being used by applications (it does not take disk cache into account). Con explained the effects of this patch:
"'This has the effect of preventing applications from being swapped out if the ram is filling up with cached data. Conversely, if many applications are in ram the swappiness increases which means the application currently in use gets to stay in physical ram while other less used applications are swapped out.
"'For desktop enthusiasts this means if you are copying large files around like ISO images or leave your machine unattended for a while it will not swap out your applications. Conversely if the machine has a lot of applications currently loaded it will give the currently running applications preference and swap out the less used ones...'"
