Nick Piggin <piggin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Was it a highmem box? If so, was the filesystem in question placing>directory pagecache in highmem? If so, that was really bad on older 2.4:
>the directory pagecache in highmem pins down all directory inodes.
>
>
2.6.2-mm1 should fix this I think.
2.6.anything should fix it. It used to, anyway.
In particular, this hunk in vm-shrink-zone.patch
That's on the direct reclaim path - for sane workloads most of the freeing
activity is via kswapd.