>I understand the idea, but I don't have a lot of faith in the kernel to make the right decision under memory pressure--and neither do server application develo

>I understand the idea, but I don't have a lot of faith in the kernel to make the right decision under memory pressure--and neither do server application developers, hence the proliferation of massive userland disk caches in processes. There is a school of thought which thinks especially server devs should just trust the operating system in this regard. One notable person of that school is phk of FreeBSD and Varnish fame: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes