Comment 482 for bug 620074

(In reply to comment #468)
> I've notices that earlier in the long list of comments. But could it be that
> others confuse the real issue with swapout slowing things down during high
> disk
> write?

This squares somewhat with my own experience:

1. The file cache is *very* aggressive, even pushing out to swap stuff I think I might be using.

2. Large writes to swap trounce interactivity (and little gets scheduled).

Small writes seem not to have an adverse effect. OK, I understand pushing out pages that haven't been used in a while in favour of more current caches; however, doing something that can result in 1.5 GiB going to page cache on a 2 GiB system (large copy, kernel compile) seem to provoke these large writes which make everything go slow.