I run across following definition of vm.swappines:The swappiness parameter controls the tendency of the kernel to move  processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk.So, if I have no swap partition any change on this parameter will be in vain?I'm pretty much sure it is so, but I wanted to check. If I'm writing from another system over Ethernet to my running board with attached disk, data is first being cached (via memory mapping), and then written to disk via DMA right?What if my RAM gets full in the meantime?
vm.swappines parameter influence on system without swap partition
linux;memory;swap
You didn't say what OS you're using, so I'm assuming Linux. In that case, usually the OOM killer does its job trying to free some memory. You can also expect kernel crashes in such situations. To answer the 1st question, no, if you don't have any swap, the vm.swappiness sysctl won't have any effect. 