> 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? The Linux kernel provides very little parameters for the vm. For what it is worth, go read /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.9/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt You will get this file after installing the kernel-doc package.