If any human being would ever read this: I've tested it on very different, another machine with Intel chipset, Celeron processor (instead of Via/AMD Athlon XP) with 512 Mb, installed latest kernel and it still swaps insanely. It became a bit less aggressive, but the problem still exists, and changing swappiness to 10 still does not help much. Opening new empty tab in chromium increases swap a bit. And that's in situation when there is 5 Mb free memory, and 160Mb cached and swappiness is set to 10.
If any human being would ever read this: I've tested it on very different, another machine with Intel chipset, Celeron processor (instead of Via/AMD Athlon XP) with 512 Mb, installed latest kernel and it still swaps insanely. It became a bit less aggressive, but the problem still exists, and changing swappiness to 10 still does not help much. Opening new empty tab in chromium increases swap a bit. And that's in situation when there is 5 Mb free memory, and 160Mb cached and swappiness is set to 10.