What Storage engine(s) are you running and with what options ? I see you have been asking questions about TokuDB so I wonder.
When it comes to Innodb with O_DIRECT we often want low dirty_ratio as storage engine itself will be doing buffer management and as some 80%+ of memory is going to be used by buffer pool we want to scale down those numbers to reflect that as dirty_ratio=20 will allow everything which is not allocated as buffer pool to be dirty
You may do well to run your own benchmark though as we find best practices can be often very situation dependent.
I am running innodb as default storage engine and TokuDB for the 4 largest tables in the DB
and we set vm.swappiness = 0 and vm.dirty_ratio = 2 when we installed mysql 5.5 with tokudb plugin
That was 2 years ago and I am now in the process to upgrade mysql and Tokudb
and not sure if I should kept it or now
Mysql 5.5 was running on Centos 5
New MySQL will be running on Cenots 7
and a lot has changed on the OS level as well in Mysql since Centos 5 and Mysql 5.5
When I have install Mysql on the new Centos 7 box sucessfully using our own backup data file I will do some testing
But this will be with new Hardware, new Centos 7, new Mysql version, More Memory, FusioIO etc
so I guess I have to run a test run with default values 60/20
and then shutdown and change the swappiness/dirty_ratio to 0/2 as we now run it with
As long this will not cause any corruption of the data it sound like it’s performance related tuning …