Comment 3 for bug 1504914

I've tested it in the upstream kernel as indicated here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds
$ uname -a
Linux ultra 3.14.1-031401-generic #201404141220 SMP Mon Apr 14 16:21:48 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

It behaves properly when swap is on, and when swap is off it slows down when reaching higher limits of memory consumption and finally google-chrome crashes and memtester quits when trying to access more than available memory.
The system stays stable, losing a little of responsiveness (even if CPU is not at maximum usage) but being still usable . I guess is reasonable expected and a much better behavior.

It comes already with this default values:
vm.swappiness = 60
vm.min_free_kbytes = 67584
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 100

Hope this helps.