Hello,

I have a server that seems to use about 10-16 gigs of ram on average. When I try to copy a large file (162G) all the free ram is cached, then *all* of the swap is eaten up. I have swappiness set to 0 in the kernel. I have used dd to copy files, this does not eat all the ram or use any swap. But dd doesnt do directories. Can anyone help me figure out the issue here, or maybe suggest another application/command for copying large files.

Thanks,
dib

Code:
 root@dbserver:/share# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         24090      23964        126          0         18      23338
-/+ buffers/cache:        606      23484
Swap:         1945       1945          0

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md2              1.4T  981G  323G  76% /
tmpfs                  12G     0   12G   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M   92K   10M   1% /dev
tmpfs                  12G  9.3G  2.8G  77% /dev/shm
/dev/md0              471M   23M  424M   6% /boot