I experience very poor system performance when running programs that need a lot of memory.
Open Office start up e.g. takes 2 minutes, and opening a small document in it takes cca. 30 seconds...
I have only a P233 machine with 64 Megs of memory, but the same programs show much better performance in windows.
I suspect that the poor performance in Linux may be due to the extensive, unreasonable use of the disk cache memory.
So far as I can judge, Linux uses the disk cache even when there is plenty of free physical memory to use.
An example: I see that the system uses 28M disk cache, when there is 38 M free (cached) physical memory.
Is there a way I can change the memory-handling policy of Linux to use the disk cache only when there is no free physical memory?

KDE is one of the most memory intensive window managers/desktop environments. You might want to try running something less greedy - I hear that BlackBox is good.

I like KDE and I would prefer to keep it.
First I would like to know if the memory management policy can be optimized in Linux.

Is there really no way to restrict disk cache usage when there is free physical memory? No way to set up or change memory handling policies?

Everything can be optimized, you can start by optimizing the way you use your linux box . clean up services, recompile kernel, but also get more RAM, *get rid of KDE...*. Well if you absolutely want KDE try not to load to many stupid unnecessary things like fading menus and other useless s***t (4 example screensavers)

el_felipe