Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 30 Nov 2001 01:29:58 -0800 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: buffer/memory strangeness in 2.4.16 |
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space-00002@vortex.physik.uni-konstanz.de wrote: > > Hi, > > I am experiencing a bit of strange system behaviour in a vanilla 2.4.16 > kernel (2.95.3, very stable machine etc.) > > I noticed, that after running for a while (day) I had significantly less > memory available for my simulation program than right after booting. Looking > at the problem using 'xosview' (or 'free'), I noticed that there was a large > number of MBs filled with 'buffers' that did not get wiped when other > programs need the memory. The system seems to rather kill an 'offender' than > clean out buffers. > >
Seconded. After an updatedb run, my 768 megabyte 2.5.1-pre4 machine shows:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 770668 384460 386208 0 138548 17744 -/+ buffers/cache: 228168 542500
and, after malloc/memset of 700 megs:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 770668 73340 697328 0 41160 5960 -/+ buffers/cache: 26220 744448 Swap: 499928 18628 481300
I repeated the malloc/memset a few times, wrote a gigabyte file and was unable to make the 40 megabytes of buffermem go away.
MemTotal: 770668 kB MemFree: 698008 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 42092 kB Cached: 6088 kB SwapCached: 9808 kB Active: 48064 kB Inactive: 10112 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 770668 kB LowFree: 698008 kB SwapTotal: 499928 kB SwapFree: 484512 kB
After running an extremely memory-intensive test program for two minutes, buffermem fell to 38 megabytes.
Seems broken to me.
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