kswapd running for 300+ms in 2.4.18?

[Chris Friesen]

We have a box on which we are trying to get some reasonable latencies (ie 10s of ms is fine, 100s is
not).  

We have an application that wants to be scheduled every 50ms or so, and a custom scheduler that
should allow for this.  If it sleeps for more than 300ms it logs the fact and dumps a history of the
last 128 processes scheduled along with timing info.  Based on this, we are seeing kswapd
occasionally running for ~340ms at a time.

Is there an easy fix to reduce this latency, or would it be a nasty intrusive change?

Thanks,

Chris