>recovering after the oom killer wipes out my X session or browser.
Perhaps you can share more details of what you're doing to force the cache to drop and what the side effects are exactly because an OOM can't be caused by the file cache since the total free memory available to applications remains the same. The whole point of the file cache is to use otherwise unallocated memory and give it up the moment it's needed. There should not be an OOM from this short of an OS bug or an over allocated virtualized system.
Last time I ran into this was a couple of years ago on a stock Arch system. (Disabilities forced me back to Windows). Every time, the largest memory consumer was the web browser. Also every time, the system became nearly unresponsive due to swap thrashing (kswapd at the top of the CPU usage list, most of which was I/O wait).
Last time I complained about this problem, someone suggested installing zram which did stop it from happening. However, this does not change the fact that there is some pathological failure case that contradicts the central thesis (not to mention, smug tone) of this website and makes searching for solutions to the problem infuriating.
Perhaps you can share more details of what you're doing to force the cache to drop and what the side effects are exactly because an OOM can't be caused by the file cache since the total free memory available to applications remains the same. The whole point of the file cache is to use otherwise unallocated memory and give it up the moment it's needed. There should not be an OOM from this short of an OS bug or an over allocated virtualized system.