> Item: If you allocate all of the RAM on the machine, you have screwed the kernel out of buffer cache it sorely needs. Back off.
Why not just permanently allocate enough RAM for the kernel? If I have 16GB of RAM but the kernel needs 1GB to do its job, then just tell me that I have 15GB to work with.
That would be nice, but quite a lot of kernel code does not work like that, specifically disk cache. 1GB is not enough for 32k PID worth of process kernel stack.
Why not just permanently allocate enough RAM for the kernel? If I have 16GB of RAM but the kernel needs 1GB to do its job, then just tell me that I have 15GB to work with.