Messages in this thread | | | From | Denys Vlasenko <> | Subject | Re: Slow, persistent memory leak in 2.6.20 | Date | Sun, 26 Aug 2007 18:03:12 +0100 |
| |
On Sunday 26 August 2007 17:16, Fred Tyler wrote: > So, I guess it worked? (I don't know what was supposed to happen, but > memory usage dropped significantly when I did this.)
If you can reclaim "leaked" memory this way, it means that you found a bug where cached data is incorrectly kept in RAM in preference of other data. (I'm assuming that you do have real problems after some time of "leaking" memory - you mention that you get swap storms and eventually machine is dead.)
> However, I'm not sure this staging machine has been up long enough or > doing enough to exhibit the problem. I can try this on my production > servers (the ones I provided graphs for) late tonight, but how safe is > running this command? Does it permanently disable file caching? Do I
Yes, it's safe to do, anytime.
It's just a command to kernel to drop as much of currently accumulated filesystem cache as it can. It is strictly a debugging/benchmarking aid.
If you end up needing to do it once in a while to keep your machine alive, something is definitely wrong. -- vda - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |