Re: Strange dcache memory pressure when highmem enabled

[Neil Brown]

On Thursday October 16, andrea@xxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> I wonder if what he's suffering from is a reduced normal zone due the
> mem_map_t being larger. The reduced normal zone will trigger the dcache
> shrinking more frequently. But he may want to try again with 2.4.23pre7
> with a classzone aware refill_inactive that will ensure the inactive
> list has enough lowmem pages before shrink_caches claims failure.
> 

I didn't end up trying Andrew's patch, but tried 2.4.23-pre7 instead.
It appears to be doing the right thing.
Free Highmem (grep HighFree /proc/meminfo) steadily dropped from 3Gig
to about 2-3 Meg and stayed there.
The dentry cache (grep dentry_cache /proc/slabinfo) climbed up to
about 500,000 and stayed there for 24 hours - much better than before
where it would often be only a few thousand and we had complaints every
night when the backups ran.

Thanks.

NeilBrown
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/