Hello everyone,
For some time now, the situation with 2.4 kernels is the following: Try to
gzip -d very large file (few times larger than physical RAM) in the
background and do some other work. You will find out that your system gets
very slow. All RAM is used up for pagecache, and even more, your application
data is getting swapped out to make more room for pagecache!
I think this is a bad behaviour, and would pretty much like to be able to
control the maximum memory used for pagecache.
Recently, I found a patch by [email protected] which implements a
pgcache-max sysctl for 2.5.x. I tried to backport it to 2.4.21 but so far
with no success (many differences in VM system).
I don't understand why not to give such a option to users, I know a lot of
them irritated with current pagecache behaviour... options and
configurability should be a good thing, no?
Best regards,
Tvrtko A. Ursulin