Hi. I would like to ask about this situation:

While I was unpacking the distribution sets, I opened another session on 
screen(1) for mounting a cdrom. Disk activity was raised very much and I had to 
wait about 30 seconds. At the same time, on top(1) I saw a [ioflush] kernel 
process on a biowait state. Then, using xuvmstat, I saw a fast growing file 
memory.

My memory usage, 256MB and usually:
50MB by executables, 100MB by anonymous, 45MB by kernel and the rest 60MB, 
usually), by file memory.

With the NEW_BUFQ_STRATEGY kernel option set.

My UVM configuration:
vm.anonmin = 48
vm.execmin = 25
vm.filemin = 0
vm.anonmax = 65
vm.execmax = 35
vm.filemax = 0
vm.bufcache = 5

These were my big processes at the time of the situation:
· X session with openbox, firefox, amule, httpd, mysqld.

I believe it is ok that free memory be used by file memory, but I need some way
to adjust the priority or some hard limit (can freemin be raised?). And I don't 
know if the file memory can be freed in a faster way than some files being 
unpacked.

Please point me at the correct mail thread if this topic has been discussed.

César

--
  César Catrián C.
  http://mioficina.cjc.cl/