Currently at my university we are running many servers with Centos 4.6 and everything is okay, but when a user does a large operation such as 'cp' or 'tar' or 'rsync' all of the physical memory gets exhausted. Our lab servers have 32GB physical to 64GB of physical memory and when a user does a large copy which involves very small but over 10k files eventually we see a kswap process. I would like to control swapping so these files don't go into memory instead they get flushed out. These computers are used for fluid dynamics calculations and I would just like to have the memory do a FIFO and use the least swap as possible. I tried setting the swapiness to '10' or '0' but that really does not help. Also, has there been a major memory management advancement from 4.6 to 5.2? If so, where can I read about the changes?
TIA