My Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4 system, seems to become unresponsive to interactive commands under heavy memory load, what can I do to change this ?

Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Update 4

When copying or creating large files running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, I/O performance may degenerate and the system may seem unresponsive to interactive commands. The system may be getting in a state where dirty pages are transitioning to the writeback state, and the system may not be doing a good job balancing the ...