According to my system settings:

$ sysctl -a | grep 'vm\.'
vm.loadavg: 4.85 3.49 2.01
vm.nkmempages = 16355
vm.anonmin = 10
vm.execmin = 5
vm.filemin = 10
vm.maxslp = 20
vm.uspace = 16384
vm.anonmax = 80
vm.execmax = 30
vm.filemax = 50

From that, I'd expect that at most 50MB would be used for file
buffering/caching.  But using top, I see:

    Memory: 144M Act, 73M Inact, 856K Wired, 34M Exec, 109M File, 944K Free

109MB!  I'm ripping and encoding some CDs, and trying to start another
(relatively memory-hungry) application, and it's extremely slow --
there's huge amounts of swapping, which I guess is because the CDDA
files are chewing up all sorts of memory buffers.

How can I reduce the amount kept aside for this?  I'm running
-current using the GENERIC kernel from late August.  I have 256MB
RAM (which is at the maximum :-(  and 1GB of swap.

NetBSD slab 1.6W NetBSD 1.6W (GENERIC_LAPTOP) #0: Sun Aug 24 20:55:15 UTC 2003  autobuild@tgm.netbsd.org:/autobuild/HEAD/i386/OBJ/autobuild/HEAD/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC_LAPTOP i386

Thanks.

-- 
     Brian de Alwis | Graduate student | Software Practices Lab | UBC
"Passivity & cynicism have always come easily to the educated." - Ed Broadbent