Hi, I've been trying to fix the VM balance for a week or so now, and things are mostly fixed except for one situation. If there is a *heavy* write going on and the data is in the page cache only .. ie. no buffer heads available, then the page cache will grow almost without bounds and kswapd and the rest of the system will basically spin in shrink_mmap()... What mechanism do we use to flush back dirty pages from eg. mmap()s? How could I push those pages to disk the way we do with buffers (by waking up bdflush)? (yes, this is a big bug, please try the attached program by Juan Quintela and set the #defines as wanted .. it'll make painfully clear that this bug exists and should be fixed) regards, Rik -- The Internet is not a network of computers. It is a network of people. That is its real strength. Wanna talk about the kernel? irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies http://www.conectiva.com/ http://www.surriel.com/