Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 06 Mar 2000 17:39:15 -0500 | From | Larry Woodman <> | Subject | Re: buffer/cache figure question (2.3.x) |
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Lawrence Manning wrote:
> I thought I understood how the buffer figure from meminfo shows only the > dcache and that all other block buffering is shown in the cache figure. > But this morning (after the machine being idle for about 8 hours) I find > about 40meg in the buffers. Now its back to its usual 4meg. Can someone > please enlighten me? I tried to follow the code, but got as far as > atomic_read(&buffermem_pages) in si_meminfo... > > Lawrence > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Lawrence, I'm not sure how much memory your machine has or what is running on it but if you had 40M in buffers something did a lot of non-filesystem IO(like a "du" command or a bunch or reads from a raw device). Then in order for the
buffers to drop back to 4M you had to run out of memory and shrink_mmap had to reclaim that 36M from the buffermem.
Larry Woodman
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