I ended up reducing vm.filemin to 5 and vm.filemax to 20.
The system is much more responsive.

  Alan

In article <slrnb3sbeh.2vr.apost@water.amer.interwoven.com>, Alan Post wrote:
> 
> I'm using a memory-limited machine, and would like to tune the buffer
> caching behavior a bit.  In particular, I'd like to limit the amount
> of caching the kernel does on behalf of xmms, since I'm more likely to
> play the next song than the previous.  But I don't want to slow down
> the system on pkgsrc builds, etc., that really benefit from the buffer
> cache.
> 
> Is there a way to give the system hints about how to limit the cache
> on a per-program or per-filesystem basis?  Or even better, to hint
> that a particular program or filesystem tends not to exhibit an MRU
> file access pattern?