Comment 17 for bug 516834

From the Ubuntu Documenatation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements#Desktop%20installation
[quote]Recommended minimum requirements

Ubuntu should run reasonably well on a computer with the following minimum hardware specification. However, features such as visual effects may not run smoothly.

    * 700 MHz x86 processor
    * 384 MB of system memory (RAM)
[...]
[/quote]
If we can't meet those requirements due to a bad swappiness-value, someone (I'm not saying who, since I don't have a clue how those things work) needs to fix it in time before the LTS is released.
Just my 2 cents.