I've been reading and trying (successfully) a blog/thread about the way vm is handling the cache/buffers and how to control it from the user's perspective in : http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/10/0...w-to-fix-that/

so now i'm using these parameters:
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50
vm.swappiness = 1

which is nice, but i'm looking for some more ui responsiveness.

now, i was wondering if the vm/kernel can be instructed to leave some applications out of the cache queue or just have them back at the end so kwin (kde's window manager) and kicker (application launcher and menu) could always be in RAM and thous be responsive to user's actions (clicks...) as far as possible.

is it possible ?

Not really. The application can indicate what its likely (re-)use of disk data is going to be, but I gather it's rarely used.
CFS has shipped in 2.6.23, and is (at least partly) designed to help desktop users (perceived ??) responsiveness.

I haven't done any testing.

As a side note updatedb is an absolute pig in regard to inode/dentry cache pollution. With Fedora you probably have a cron entry to run it every day - I run it when I feel it's necessary.

thank you for the info :-)

i use both fedora and debian distros and you are right about the cron issue. but i use fedora on servers so it does not matter much.