[svlug] Need a good authoritative article.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting James Sparenberg (james at linuxrebel.org):

> Oh I've shown my experts the output of free.  However they still contend that 
> our applications are slowed down because Linux is taking up all the ram (mind 
> you the apps are running faster than ever before since I started tweaking the 
> FS, also never mind that Windows OSX and Solaris do the same on other 
> systems)   One must be aware that I'm dealing with experts, this has nothing 
> to do with knowledge.  
> 
> These are the kinds of people who would argue with Knuth about the art of 
> programming. ;)

I had an evil thought, about how to illustrate what your "expert"
friends insist on not understanding:  Try showing them how well the system 
actually _does_ work with no disk cache (or as close to none as you can get).  

It's not obvious how to completely disable disk caching.  (Presumably,
the kernel coders' reaction could be summed up as "You want to do _what_?")
However, htcacheclean(8) can periodically lop it off, like so:

#  htcacheclean -d1 -l0

That runs the htcacheclean utility in daemon mode, doing cache cleaning
every 1 minute, and limiting disk cache size to zero bytes.

(Completely untested, but, if it works tolerably well, should illustrate
the "Hey, chum, using uncommitted RAM for disk caching is a _good thing_" 
point better than any explanation in words could.)