Comment # 57 on bug 1159882 from Robert Delahunt

Nevermind, I re-checked and saw the date stamp was 25 September, so I
reinstalled (what should be) the new kernel.  Here are your new vmstats:

http://www.puresimplicity.net/~delahunt/vmstat/mhocko2/

I have 32GB of RAM now but still it dug into about 20 MB of swap, even with
swappiness=1.

Changing swappiness to 60 during this operation didn't seem to influence how
much swap it was using, as it still hovered around 20MB or so.

It does this both with a file operation (copying large files to an external
512GB SSD in an enclosure) or zeroizing this drive when finished (dd
if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc1 bs=4K count=1024 etc)

I noticed that running sync after the file copy operation dug into swap, i.e.
after terminating the copy command, took a long while.

Please advise.