Re: minimizing buffer size (i.e. page cache) for bulk copy/rsync -- Re: Swappiness in Buster

[Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org>]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 08:00:38AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> Zenaan Harkness wrote: 
> > 
> > Seriously, is there a way to stop bulk copies from eternally flushing my
> > $Desktop's cached pages down the drain minute after blessful minute,
> > hour after gratitude filled hour?
> 
> softlimit is packaged in daemontools.
> 
> NAME
>        softlimit - runs another program with new resource
> limits.

I haven't been following this thread because I don't know anything
about the kernel's "swappiness" settings.

But I'm a little bit confused about the intent here -- setting a
resource limit on memory is just going to make the program crash
with an "out of memory" error when it tries to exceed the limit.
It's not going to discipline a memory hog program into using
different algorithms.