Offloading to SD card makes sense - wouldn't that mean hotswapping is only possible between SD cards with swap partitions already written into them? If so, perhaps a swap-enabling script is in order - check for x bytes of space free on card, run one of the partition resizing/making programs to shrink the partition containing the free space, then create your swap one. Then mount the entire thing.

One or two more scripts and you could probably make it capable of dumping between the on-device swap partition (assuming you leave it there) and the SD-card ones... Would be a pain in the ***, but seems doable enough, at least in theory.

As for hawaii and trolling - he's not a troll. He's just sometimes quite hostile when it comes to newbs. Which is okay, most of the time. Also, see that "Know Nokia" link in his signature? You know, the one he runs? The one where the swappolube mods were born from, the one where he shows how to enable locked wifi frequencies, etc? Know that pwnitter app in the repos? He kinda made that too, if I recall correctly. He's also ported NetDiscover onto the N900 I believe, and has posted quite a lot of useful advice on here while he's been around.

Just because he doesn't regularly sugar-coat his opinions doesn't mean he's a troll.

Now, onto productive things: So I tested this with just the two queue changes - immediately attempting to download the Stellarium catalogue I was trying to download worked faster (I had given up after multiple attempts, and decided to see if your changes would make it better. Seems that they actually did).

So far, I'm leaving swappiness at 20 (I left it there a while ago, don't really significantly notice the difference between 30 and 20, but meh), and within a little bit I'll also see what effect dropping the dirty ratios will have. For now they're at the very high swappolube values.

Hawaii: About the drop caches - I know how it's used, I believe - echo 1 to it to make the caches get emptied, but then it continues caching as normal, from what I know. But would it get rid of the stuff mentioned earlier - the stuff that gets used in bootup and then doesn't get touched? If so, then it should be reasonably harmless to drop caches once late in the boot process, and then let things go naturally from there, to clean out all the unneeded after boot stuff, correct, as I understand it, and running it only once should prevent the higher loads later on, right?