2.4.24 Paging Fault, Cache tries to swap with no swap partition

[Ross Dickson]

Greetings,

I have an imaging system writing files to removable hard drives.
Compact Flash boot with ram drives so I usually have no swap partition or file.

Recently I upgraded kernel from 2.4.20 to 2.4.24.

System has "mem=460M" (512M ram fitted) and starts with about
400M free. After recording for a while the Cached ram acquires all
but about 4Mb MemFree.

On a hot 38C day it started Oops'ing re paging memory. It runs the
same 2 programs all day gathering and compressing images.
Sorry I have no detail on the Oops at the moment, computer is in a vehicle and
does not normally have a screen. From memory it couldn't allocate a virtual 
page.

I found if I put in a 16Mb ram drive as swap then it would grab
roughly 1.4Mb of it on occasion and keep it until recording stopped
for a while. SwapCached is either 0Kb or 1024Kb, not anything else.

Is this behaviour expected - to require a swap file? 
Can the paging cache be tuned in /proc or somewhere to prevent it being so 
greedy as to want more memory than the machine has?

Is the quickest fix to give it more ram. I read on another posting that with
greater than 512Mb the cache won't grab any more?

Regards
Ross.
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