How can I avoid running out of memory when copying large files?
You can tell the Linux kernel not to wait so long before writing data out to backing storage. echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio These settings are even tighter and should help even on a system that is doing a large amount of larger-than-RAM data transfers. echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio echo 5120 > /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes When a large MTU, like 9000, is in being used on the AoE-side network interfaces, a larger min_free_kbytes setting like min_free_kbytes=65536 could be helpful. If you find the /proc settings to be helpful, you can make them permanent by editing /etc/sysctl.conf or by creating an init script that performs the settings at boot time.
