help...where is my memory going?

From: Chris Friesen (cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com)
Date: Fri May 16 2003 - 13:19:45 EST


I've got an embedded blade with a powerpc chip and a gig of ram. There are
hardly any processes running, but I'm using up 106MB of memory, mostly due to
91MB of cache--only one problem, the filesystem is only 27MB.

I boot it with a normal ramdisk, then create a tmpfs filesystem, copy everything
to it, pivot to the new filesystem, chroot, and then clean up the ramdisk with
blockdev. These measurements were made by shutting down most of the default
startup processes, then running a tool which chews progressively larger amounts
of memory until it gets OOM-killed. I figure this should result in as much
memory as possible being extracted from the buffer/cache.

I can see needing the following:
27MB filesystem
a few megs for running processes (data only, tmpfs is execute in place IIRC)
maybe 10 megs for the kernel?

Any ideas what the remaining ~50MB is?

Here are some program outputs that might be useful:

[root@10.40.14.67 tmp]# top
16 processes: 15 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.4% user, 4.9% system, 0.1% nice, 93.4% idle
Mem: 1010480K av, 106148K used, 904332K free, 0K shrd, 1276K buff
Swap: 0K av, 0K used, 0K free 91076K cached

   PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
     1 root 4 0 436 436 292 S 0.0 0.0 0:10 init
     2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
     3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
     4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 kswapd
     5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
     6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kupdated
   353 root 9 0 748 732 432 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 xinetd
   932 root 9 0 532 532 344 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 crond
  1018 root 9 0 300 300 172 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
  1143 root 9 0 500 500 308 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 in.telnetd
  1144 root 9 0 1064 1064 684 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 login
  1145 mtc 9 0 1424 1424 1024 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 bash
  1219 root 9 0 1392 1392 160 S 0.0 0.1 0:02 minilogd
  1445 root 10 0 1128 1128 832 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 su
  1447 root 14 0 1684 1684 1268 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 bash
  1456 root 14 0 1192 1192 892 R 0.0 0.1 0:00 top

[root@10.40.14.67 tmp]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 37M 27M 10M 71% /

[root@10.40.14.67 tmp]# cat /proc/meminfo
         total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 1034731520 108552192 926179328 0 1306624 93261824
Swap: 0 0 0
MemTotal: 1010480 kB
MemFree: 904472 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 1276 kB
Cached: 91076 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 88664 kB
Inactive: 7524 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 1010480 kB
LowFree: 904472 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB

[root@10.40.14.67 tmp]# mount
tmpfs on / type tmpfs (rw,size=37M)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0622)

[root@10.40.14.67 tmp]# mount -t ext2 /dev/ramdisk /mnt
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/ramdisk,
        or too many mounted file systems

Note: at this last command, the serial console prints:

VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev ramdisk(1,0).

-- 
Chris Friesen                    | MailStop: 043/33/F10
Nortel Networks                  | work: (613) 765-0557
3500 Carling Avenue              | fax:  (613) 765-2986
Nepean, ON K2H 8E9 Canada        | email: cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com

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