Thanks for the response. The real concern comes from administrators or other less technical staff logging into the box, and getting concerned at the amount of memory used up. Although user education is always positively accepted, the general comfort level would be much higher if they could login to a host and not see that 98% of memory is in use. Regarding performance, this isn't much of a concern, although this host is intermittently hit with large work loads (which is why the kernel cache reaches the point of consuming all memory) which consume much memory, and another thought was that when these sporadic work loads proceed, there would be a slight performance hit waiting for free memory to be available as the cache is cleared. If this thought is misguided please let me know. Either way, what would be the correct method for tuning the kernel parameters? Justin. -----Original Message----- From: Daniel de Kok [mailto:danieldk at pobox.com] Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 10:36 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] kbcached tuning on CentOS 4 On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 10:31 -0400, Justin Randall wrote: > I had been chasing a potential memory leak until "sar -r", had > revealed that all the "mysteriously used" memory was actually being > taken up by the kernel data cache. It is chewing up all unused memory > on the system slowly over time, which is a concern. Why is this a concern? The larger a cache is, the more potential cache hits. Linux is pretty smart about managing caches and buffers, and will grow/shrink the cache depending on the amount of memory. -- Daniel _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos