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SubjectRe: ext3 inode cache eats system, news at 11
Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:
>
> One of the remaining bits of weirdness with my x86_64 system has been that
> I often find it unresponsive in the morning; it's harder to get out of bed
> than my middle-school son. Some things happen (the pointer moves in
> response to the mouse) but everything on the system seems asleep. Very
> little disk activity happens. Eventually, usually, the system comes back
> to life, but that can take 15-30 minutes.
>
> I've managed to correlate this behavior with processes which read through
> the whole disk. The nightly updatedb run is the worst offender, but a full
> backup of the disk can do it as well.
>
> A look at /proc/meminfo (appended below) shows that the bulk of main memory
> is taken up by the slab cache. I'll append a full slabinfo listing as
> well, but two things stand out:
>
> ext3_inode_cache 488356 488978 1128 7 2

^^^

It's that 1-order allocation which is causing the problem. I thought we'd
beaten this behaviour out of the slab code but it seems not.



ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.6-rc2/2.6.6-rc2-mm2/broken-out/slab-order-0-for-vfs-caches.patch

is not a completely happy solution, but it should fix things up.
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