On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 15:31:03 +0100 (MET) Paul Kranenburg <pk@cs.few.eur.nl>
wrote:

> > Its bizarre. the apparent symptoms are: slowness re-painting X11 (eg screen
> > refresh from a virtual desktop re-position for mozilla, which is widget rich
> > and requires lots of discrete X callbacks to repaint) and a lot more disk
> > noise than
> 
> The effect of the new buffer cache code on the vnode cache has already been
> noted. I would expect the drag you're experiencing to be largely eliminated
> if you'd revert the maximum memory use for the buffer to historic levels,
> i.e. to around 5% of physical memory.  To verify that this is the case,
> could you do
> 
> 	`sysctl -w vm.bufcache=5'
> 
> and see if that makes the symptoms go away?

Yes. Many thanks. 

So with the default I got on boot 30, and 5 demonstrating a marked improvement,
whats a rational choice? I'm tempted to try binary chop on the space between for
a while. 30 must have been predicated on some belief about 'more is better' but
it clashed head-on with interactive response on laptops (at least). 

cheers
	-George
> 
> -pk