On Monday, November 15, 2010 00:00:17 Garry T. Williams wrote:
[snip]
You might try clearing the cache. From a root prompt, type:
sync; echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
You also may want to read this article:
http://www.linuxatemyram.com/play.html
Note the reference to swapiness at the bottom of the page. That's another tunable that you might want to try. Lowering that value will make more application pages stay in real memory rather than be written out to swap.