(I originally sent to netbsd-help a few days ago. I add some more details 
   below. Please carbon-copy me on replies.)
   
   vmstat -s says:
   
      10312 cached file pages
   
   which is 40MB for me and top(1) also says "40M File".
   
   I have 128 MB.
   
   I set vm.filemax almost two hours ago:
   
      vm.filemax = 1
   
   I have 45MB or more of swap being used.
   
   Why isn't that 40MB cached file going down? I want to use real physical memory 
   better!


because nothing wants that ram.  if anything want ram, the file memory
upto it's "max" would be released for other users, but, i guess your
applications don't want to do that.  you should also monitor eg "vmstat 1"
to see how much paging activity is actually happening.  those are the "pi"
and "po" (page in/page out) fields.  on my 512MB machine with 162MB of
swap used, i almost never see actual paging events.

do you have actual application performance issues?


.mrg.