Same thing happens on 2.4.18.

I attached sar, slabinfo and /proc/meminfo data on the 2.6.5 machine.  I 
reproduce this behavior by simply untarring a 260meg file on a 
production server, the machine becomes sluggish as it swaps to disk. Is 
there a way to limit the cache so this machine, which has 1 gigabyte of 
memory, doesn't dip into swap?

Thanks,

Brett