Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:40:03 +0200 (CEST) | From | Guennadi Liakhovetski <> | Subject | Re: [2.6.17.4] slabinfo.buffer_head increases |
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On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote: > >>> On Mon, 10 Jul 2006, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote: >>> >>>> I am obsering a steadily increasing buffer_head value in slabinfo under >>>> 2.6.17.4. I searched the net / archives and didn't find anything >>>> directly relevant. Does anyone have an idea or how shall we debug it? >>> >> >> The problem is still there under 2.6.18-rc2. I narrowed it down to ext3 >> journal. To reproduce one just has to mount an ext3 partition and perform >> (write) accesses to it. A loop { touch /mnt/foo; sleep 1; } suffices - just >> let it run for a couple of minutes and monitor buffer_head in >> /proc/slabinfo. If you mount it as ext2 the problem is gone. > > > What data mode is ext3 mounted with?
Default, i.e., ordered, I guess.
> Is the memory reclaimable? If yes, is it a problem?
Yes, that's why I later wrote that the problem is not real. It was hard to see as we had a lot of free RAM on the system, the system was idle apart from one script that only did "touch x" periodically with the same "x" and the buffer_head slab was growing very steadily. Unlike with ext2 / reiserfs. That's why I decided it was not ok. But the memory is reclaimable, so, seems like not a problem. Just a bit odd that such a "harmless" operation causes a steady growth of buffer_heads...
Thanks Guennadi --------------------------------- Guennadi Liakhovetski, Ph.D. DSA Daten- und Systemtechnik GmbH Pascalstr. 28 D-52076 Aachen Germany - 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/
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