Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Unfreeable buffer/cache problem in 2.4.17-rc1 still there | From | Chris Chabot <> | Date | 15 Dec 2001 18:09:00 +0100 |
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Mark Han wrote, > first, forget silly crap like top; look at the /proc files. > inode/dentry caches are just slab caches, which afaik > are not considered part of the 'cached' that top is talking about. > (since top preceeds slab and is referring to buffer+page caches.)
Man somebody got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning ;-) The problem is that those prety user end lights are the only things the user see's ;-) So it might be worth considering exporting this 'secret' information to the user end (count it as cache in /proc/memusage?)
> what makes you think there's anything wrong with this? you have tons of > memory, and aren't using it hard, so the kernel uses it to cache files, > inodes, dentries, etc.
I know, cache is good. However first of all, 400 to 600 mb of cache used for dentries/inodes seems a little steep to me (as not kernel hacker), and when i do fire up memory hogging applications (mysql,apache,java etc) the 'evaporated' memory is not returned for those applications. Resulting in heavy swapping and a non-responsive system. For a dual p3 with 1 gig of ram, this feels like a problem, yes ;-) do note then when i do a simple find /, it do see the memory being used in cached and buffers. This is not the case for the 'missing memory'
Ken Brownfield wrote, > I think "updatedb" at 4am is what you're looking for... How much disk > space do you have on this system? The system has 2 x 18Gb scsi disks (/ and /home) and a single raid0 volume (4x 80 gig ide) as archival storage. Doing a find | wc -l on the archives alone tells me i have more then 340000 files there.. (ranging between a few bytes to > 1 gig)
But indeed, when i run updatedb, the problem of non-visable memory (for me using top / free anyways) does apear.. good catch!
Andrea wrote, > this is an icache/dcache problem, can you reproduce on 2.4.17rc1aa1, > it will shrink more aggressively.
doing that (updatedb), i dont have to wait a day or so to see what happens, mem free (+buffers + cache from /proc/meminfo) is around 550Mb, 'used memory' (counting ps aux res usage) is < 100Mb. So quite a couple of megabytes have disapeard again ;/
-- Chris
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