Red Hat memory allocation

[Yard, John]

On a Red Hat 3.2 system running Sun Directory Server
Sun DS had a virtual memory failure and hung
while I was running a system stress test.

The test involved running 30 DS entry scans.

I noticed that the steady-state memory behavior of the system
leaves only 1% or less of the system memory in the free pool:

eds2:/root] # vmstat 1 
procs                      memory      swap          io     system
cpu
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy
wa id
 0  0      0 115600 273828 5364176    0    0     0     2    1     2  0
0  0  3
 0  0      0 115600 273828 5364180    0    0     0    52  191   142  0
0  0 100
 0  0      0 115600 273828 5364180    0    0     0     0  178   134  0
0  0 100
 0  0      0 115600 273828 5364180    0    0     0     0  180   111  0
0  0 100

Most systems I am aware of recommend 10%-15% of memory
on the free pool as a low-water mark.

I think I need to set the steady state free pool at ~10%.

Am I on the right track ?
How do I do this ?

JYard
UCLA