On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 11:20:14AM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> I'm getting tired of the fact that my system's response have gone down 
> dramatically the last year or so.
> I believe the problem is in the unified memory buffer handling. The disk 
> cache is way to agressive in grabbing memory.
Seconded. I have seen the same on other OS (e.g. Tru64) too. The
filesystem buffer cache eats up all memory, executable pages are reused
resulting in heavy paging when an application process is touched again. 
This is really annoying.

> I think the system currently is very badly tuned by default.
Seconded. Currently the system works well if the entire system "work
set" is kept in RAM. But if the system is used interactively and
something like un-tar(1)ing src.tar.gz is run, interactrive
responsiveness is bad to catastrophic.

> But I know that people probably disagree with me, so I have just one 
> question: how do I limit the file cache to take no more than, say, 16 MB?
> No matter how much the system thinks it *might* be able to use.
I would like to know this too.
-- 



tschüß,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/