minimizing swap usage

[christian e]

Hi,all

Can someone give me a pointer to how I can avoid somethign like this:

foo@bar]$ free -m
	    total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           249        245          4          0          6       136
-/+ buffers/cache:        102        147
Swap:          243         89        153

What's with all the caching when my apps crawl because it's swapping so 
much ? I've tried to adjust /proc/vm/kswapd parameters but that doesn't 
seem to help..I'd like to postpone the swapping until its almost out of 
physical memory..

best regards

Christian