Folks,

We have some customers with some fairly beefy servers.  They can get the 
system into an unusable state that has been reported on lkml before.  Namely, 
kswapd starts taking 100% of a CPU, any other process that attempts to 
allocate memory starts to spin on memory locks, etc.  The box slows way down, 
and is pretty much dead when this happens.  Kswapd never drops below 50%.  
Slabinfo shows that the inode and buffer caches have grown enormously, and 
low memory is nearly gone.  (But several Gb of high memory is available.)

This pathalogical behavior can be triggered by something as simple as:
	"cd / ; cp -r . /raidfs"
Where /raidfs and root are HW RAID arrays.

The two attached patches applied to 2.4.19 fix the problem on our test boxes.

Are these patches still considered a good idea for 2.4?  Is there something 
better I should be using?

TIA,

-- 
James Cleverdon
IBM xSeries Linux Solutions
{jamesclv(Unix, preferred), cleverdj(Notes)} at us dot ibm dot com