Discussion:- Should swappiness be set to 1 and not 0

Sorry if this not the correct forum to have this discussion but it does affect customers.

Alk I'm not sure if you are the right person to assign this to but I feel you have great knowledge in this area and seen a number of customer cases.

We currently recommend that customers have a swap space and that they set vm.swappiness to zero. I believe the idea behind this is to never use swap unless you really have to i. physical memory is full.

Unfortunately linux kernel has changed this behaviour of vm.swappiness in newer kernels:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2014/04/28/oom-relation-vm-swappiness0-new-kernel/

In light of this should we change our recommendation to 1?

Further more do we test our recommendation in extreme cases such as running out of memory? (more a question for test).