Linux not freeing large disk cache when memory demand goes up

I have discovered the answer to my own question - thanks to womble's help (submit an answer if you like).

lsof -s shows file handles in use, and turns out there were several gigabytes of mmap'd log files taking up the cache.

Implementing a logrotate should resolve the issue completely and allow me to take advantage of more memory.

I will also re-enable swap so we have no problems with the OOM killer in the future. Thanks.