Comment 19 for bug 501715

Thanks god someone else noticed this high memory usage. I kept asking people on #ubuntu+1 and all I got was: "This is normal for Linux". This high caching memory usage would be normal, if my system didn't start using the swap file once the RAM memory gets used by the caching memory. I never noticed this problem in Karmic, probably because I did a clean install and used the vanilla kernels from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ in the last 4 or 5 months. Previously (in Karmic) "Reclaim memory" function in Ailurus would reclaim almost all of the caching memory, but now it fails to do that. Something is eating the memory.

This is how my computer behaves:
I have 2GiB of Ram installed
System monitor reports that 38% of the Memory is used by programs, 62% of Memory is in use as cash, and I have for instance 160MiB used from the swap space (and once the swap is being used, the system erformance is hit seriously).
If I try: sudo swapoff -a , the swapoff process dies and the swap partition is not disabled. Why? Because there is not enough RAM memory available to transfer the data contained into the swap partition. But how can this be when 62% of it is "free"? 62% of 2GiB of ram is a lot more than 160MiB. I even tried uninstalling ureadahead but that doesn't help. So I'm not sure that the problem is strictly located in ureadahead.