Comment 46 for bug 516834

Personally I would say this swappiness should still be resolved in some fashion. Since upgrading to oneiric on a few boxes that have 2GB of RAM i'm finding that compiz will capitalize a sizable chunk of memory which ends up using up a lot of swap after running for a day or two. The performance is abysmal at this point. There might be a problem causing compiz to use up this much memory in the first place, but the same thing happens if you leave thunderbird running with several mail accounts with multi GB mbox files.

So be it a ubuntu specific kernel patch to set a different default, a sysctl conf file, or an init script, I think this should still be fixed at least for the desktop scenario.