We want to swap http://talk.maemo.org/images/icons/icon8.gifas much unused data out as we can (ie. X init and bootup code, shells hosting blocked scripts, etc) to free memory for stuff we care about yet don't want to swap out stuff we might want again (and in a hurry). My argument for a low swappiness factor is.. since we're under so much pressure anyway the system will not have trouble finding excuses to page out.