We had a discussion about swappiness at the last meeting. Here's what my system defaults to:

cat /etc/fedora-release Fedora Core release 3 (Heidelberg) cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 60

I don't see this being changed in any of the init scripts, so the default is most likely changed in the Fedora kernel from 100 to 60. If you want to tune it, you should be able to just stick this in /etc/sysctl.conf: vm.swappiness = <new value> Here is more information on what this is all about: http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000