"The trigger for the discussion was a response from Jesper Krogh to Torvalds' announcement of kernel version 2.6.29, in which he described massive delays in writing out the file system cache on Ext3 file systems despite fast RAID arrays on computers with lots of RAM.
"Ingo Molnar identified the maximum dirty ratio -- the proportion of memory which has to be written to the hard drive -- as a major part of the problem. The dirty ratio is still, according to Molnar, five percent of the RAM, which, in the past, on systems with, say, 1GB of RAM, didn't really matter."
