On 13/07/2010 19:30, James wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-07-13 at 19:01 +0100, Hugo Mills wrote:
>> Not that I'm aware of. Linux uses all the spare RAM for cache,
>> because having spare RAM unused would be a waste. If a process
>> actually needs more RAM (because it's starting up and allocating
>> memory, say), then some files are evicted from cache to make space.
>
> It uses it *very* aggressively, though, and seemingly with no way to
> restrain it. To the point where copying a few large (order gigabytes)
> files will cause the cache to grow to over 3/4 physical, and push out a
> lot of stuff allocated to applications I'm using (including X). And then
> interactivity just plummets. (I seem to remember a certain scientific
> app that uses large amounts of RAM getting swapped out, too.)
That sounds more like an IO/bandwidth problem to me.
--
Dee Earley (dee@???)
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