Recently, there are reported problem about thrashing.
(http://marc.info/?l=rsync&m=128885034930933&w=2)
It happens by backup workloads(ex, nightly rsync).
That's because the workload makes just use-once pages
and touches pages twice. It promotes the page into
active list so that it results in working set page eviction.
Some app developer want to support POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE.
But other OSes don't support it, either.
(http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=128928979512086&w=2)
By Other approach, app developer uses POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED.
But it has a problem. If kernel meets page is writing
during invalidate_mapping_pages, it can't work.
It is very hard for application programmer to use it.
Because they always have to sync data before calling
fadivse(..POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to make sure the pages could
be discardable. At last, they can't use deferred write of kernel
so that they could see performance loss.
(http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/fadvise.html)