There is no real answer to your question as always "it depends".
Swap does not really affect performance directly and it depends on what you are doing.
In general, your kernel is already optimized for performance and it is unlikely you will gain any performance by tweaking the values.
With regard to swap, the question is how much RAM do you have and how much do you use ?
If you are using more ram then you have you will use swap and you will take a performance hit. However, if you do not have swap available, and you run out of RAM, your programs will crash or lock up or you will loose data, hard to say.
If you are taking a performance hit due to swap the solution is to buy more RAM not disable swap.
Performance can be affected by graphics cards or other hardware including poor performing wireless drivers (or any kernel driver really).
To debug your performance question we would need to know your hardware , what you are doing, what makes you think you have a performance problem, and probably benchmarks before and after you make your tweaks to swap or whatever.
On my system I have 4 GB of RAM and with normal desktop activities such as running a browser , word processing, email, etc I never run out of RAM
bodhi@daemon:~$free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 5403 2558 739 77 2106 2398
Swap: 0 0 0
In fact I am not even using a swap partition.
If, however, I want to fire up a Virtual Machine, and give it 1 GB of RAM, you bet I need swap, so in that event I mount my swap partition.
On my big server I run multiple virtual machines, but I have 16 Gb RAM. With all my VM I hit swap every now and again, but not much. Certainly better to use swap then to have a VM crash.
So it depends .... server side, it I hit my swap to the point where performance of the VM were slow I would buy more RAM. desktop side, I just don't need to run a VM enough to justify purchasing more RAM. Personal choice.
You need to analyze your usage and make your own choices. At this point we do not even know how much or how little you are limited by swap as opposed to other issues. If you have enough RAM, don't use swap at all and then it is a non-issue.
ls -alt /var/crash
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