"Swapping" does not imply that the system is only swapping. Yes, if the system is only swapping - or, more accurately, if kswapd is what's pegging your CPUs at

"Swapping" does not imply that the system is only swapping. Yes, if the system is only swapping - or, more accurately, if kswapd is what's pegging your CPUs at 100% - then you have problems. But the kernel will try to swap out unused pages to make room for the disk cache. If you turn this off, it won't do that, and you could end up hitting the disk more. Modern systems are usually teetering near the edge of using all physical RAM. This is by design; unused RAM is wasted. You want to use as much RAM as possible to avoid going to disk. What you call "OOMing" is when the applications on the system require more physical RAM than what exists. This is independent from the swappiness ratio.