I applied your patch to 2.6.8-rc-bk10 and the system survied 
three concurrent du -s started each started with a delay.

Conspicuous is that memory usage (xosview) does not go above 1.5GB now.
Here is a snapshoot of cat/proc/vmstat taken at a time when memory usage
has stagnated.

--
Klaus

nr_dirty 1294
nr_writeback 0
nr_unstable 0
nr_page_table_pages 425
nr_mapped 38811
nr_slab 211923
pgpgin 1157363
pgpgout 150328
pswpin 0
pswpout 0
pgalloc_high 295581
pgalloc_normal 716183
pgalloc_dma 5455
pgfree 1150071
pgactivate 115758
pgdeactivate 74788
pgfault 263245
pgmajfault 1441
pgrefill_high 0
pgrefill_normal 74461
pgrefill_dma 327
pgsteal_high 0
pgsteal_normal 97886
pgsteal_dma 527
pgscan_kswapd_high 0
pgscan_kswapd_normal 92301
pgscan_kswapd_dma 490
pgscan_direct_high 0
pgscan_direct_normal 22869
pgscan_direct_dma 180
pginodesteal 22206
slabs_scanned 6414979
kswapd_steal 79035
kswapd_inodesteal 32158
pageoutrun 535
allocstall 562
pgrotated 5286
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