Pagecache going out of control (2.4)

[Tvrtko A. Uršulin]

Hello everyone,

For some time now, the situation with 2.4 kernels is the following: Try to 
gzip -d very large file (few times larger than physical RAM) in the 
background and do some other work. You will find out that your system gets 
very slow. All RAM is used up for pagecache, and even more, your application 
data is getting swapped out to make more room for pagecache!

I think this is a bad behaviour, and would pretty much like to be able to 
control the maximum memory used for pagecache.

Recently, I found a patch by indou.takao@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx which implements a 
pgcache-max sysctl for 2.5.x. I tried to backport it to 2.4.21 but so far 
with no success (many differences in VM system).

I don't understand why not to give such a option to users, I know a lot of 
them irritated with current pagecache behaviour... options and 
configurability should be a good thing, no?

Best regards,
Tvrtko A. Ursulin

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