Increasing performance by tuning swappiness

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

Swappiness[1] is believed to increase perfomance by setting the amount
of RAM an application may use before switching to swap.

The following command:
# cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
reports that the XO distro is using 60 as the current value.

A specific value may be set as the default in /etc/sysctl.conf
Example: vm.swappiness = 70

The question is, would using another value here increase performance?
I think so.  It's a matter of finding what is the better value and,
considering the hardware will remain pretty much the same from here
on, it is likely worthy to set something according to the laptop's
needs.

Any thoughts on this subject?

-Ivo

[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000