Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 8 Sep 1996 14:05:23 +0200 (MET DST) | From | Hubert Mantel <> | Subject | Re: cache eating memory in 2.0.18?? |
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Hello,
On Sun, 8 Sep 1996, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On 7 Sep 1996 ulmo@q.net wrote: > > > > cache (instead of buff) seems to be eating memory now in 2.0.18. > > > > It doesn't seem to happen as horribly as with buff bloat though. > > > > Is this behavoir correct?: > > Without knowing exactly how the machine depends, I'd say that it is > indeed correct, and nothing to worry about.
I do worry about. On a machine with only 8 MB and no swap, memory is getting very, very tight.
I did lots of tests the last days. It seems that the size of the cache never falls beyond 1 MB. So if I try to install on a machine with 8 MB using a compressed ramdisk, it will fail if I use a kernel version 2.0.13-2.0.18 (I tested every version of these until now).
Using 2.0.0 everything is fine. When using 2.0.0 I can see, that the cache memory gets as small as only 24 K. The machine is getting very very slow, but it runs.
With newer kernels, I'm missing at least 1 MB of memory. Is this a feature in order to improve performance when enough memory is available?
> One thing that makes the "cache" number look large is that the cache is very > tightly shared with process pages, and essentially any code pages in memory > will generally be in the cache too. So it's not uncommon to have quite large > numbers for cache if you're running lots of programs: it doesn't necessarily > mean that the actual filesystem cache is very large, it can just mean that > there are lots of unmodified code pages in memory..
With my tests, I only run exactly one program (and a shell to execute "free"). I wonder why there is used cache at all because the only existing file system is the ramdisk?
> Linus
Hubert mantel@suse.de
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