I have an application that is generating HUGE amounts of dirty data. Multiple GiB worth, and I'd like to allow it to fill at least half of my RAM.

I already have /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio pegged at 80 and the background one pegged at 50. RAM is 32GiB.

it appears to be butting heads with clean memory. How do I tell my system to prefer using RAM to soak up writes instead of caching?

Atm I'm at the stage where I'm prepared to patch the kernel itself.