[CentOS] kernel and memory question

Tue Sep 23 10:07:07 UTC 2008
Mag Gam <magawake at gmail.com>

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