[kde-linux] VM and Swap problems

[James Richard Tyrer]

My system has developed an odd problem.

I have about 1 GByte of disk swap space and 7/16 GByte of RAM.

The VM and swap work fine till the swap space is half full.  But, after 
swap is half full the system starts removing swap until it is exactly 
half full.  When this happens, the VM system starts to thrash and the 
system won't do anything till the thrashing stops.

I don't know if this is a KDE related problem -- perhaps there is 
something about the way KDE allocates memory that causes the thrashing.

The system should reclaim swap but it appears that it needs to do it at 
a higher percentage of the swap space and to do it slower.

IAC, I think that this is a Kernel issue and that I should be able to 
configure it by writing a variable in /proc/ somewhere.  But, after 
reading through the documentation I can't find any info about what to do.

-- 
JRT