As part of the memory management changes expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle is allowing more fine-tuned control over the swappiness setting used to determine how aggressively pages are swapped out of physical system memory and into the on-disk swap space.
With the new code from Meta, a swappiness argument is supported for memory.reclaim. This effectively allows more finer-grained control over the swapiness behavior without overriding the global swappiness setting.
Ouch, hope you can get that sorted out. A broken disk my also “deadlock” the system when binaries it tries to start are on that disk and no longer in cache, e.g. sshd or your shell.
In my experience when only ping sporadically works it’s an OOM issue, if the ssh login fails weirdly it can also be an I/O issue. If your network is working as expected obviously.