Pagecache going out of control (2.4)

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 [email protected] 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