disk cache tuning

[Eugene L. Vorokov]

Hello.

I have a box with FreeBSD 5.4, where disk subsystem is a bottleneck.
It runs several applications which access huge number of files, usually small.
They do not require a lot of memory, network I/O is also not very intensive.

I have read tuning(7), enabled softupdates, noatime and such. But I have an
impression that most of the memory (1Gb) is not really used, while it could be
used for disk cache. top(1) reports about 800Mb as inactive, and
reading 200-300Mb
of information from disk still causes a lot of disk activity.

How can I increase the amount of memory used for disk cache without touching
other subsystems ? As far as I understand, simply increasing MAXUSERS is not
a good idea, because it will also increase NMBCLUSTERS and such, which I do
not really want.

Please Cc: me as I'm not on this list.

Regards,
Eugene