Re: Memory and rsync problem with vanilla 2.6.7

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Grzegorz Kulewski wrote:
> 
> Is this bug or feature? Is there some wreid memmory leak? Where is my RAM?

Your memory is apparently in dentry and inode memory:

	ext3_inode_cache   62553  62553   4096		(244MB)
	dentry_cache       48768  48768   4096		(190MB)

and it really looks like you have enabled CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC, which 
just eats memory like mad (a dentry is normally ~200 bytes, but then when 
it is rounded up to page-size, it takes 20 times the memory).

So don't enable DEBUG_PAGEALLOC unless you really want to debug some 
strange problem.

That said, there might be a memory balancing problem too, and
DEBUG_PAGEALLOC just makes it more obvious.  Nick Piggin reports that an
"obvious fix" by Andrew potentially causes problems, and if you're a BK
user, you could try just backing out this cset:

	ChangeSet@xxxxxxxxxxx, 2004-06-03 07:58:03-07:00, akpm@xxxxxxxx
	  [PATCH] shrink_all_memory() fixes

	....

(check with "bk changes" what the revision is in your tree, and do a

	bk cset -xX.XXX.XX.X

to try reverting it. Quite possibly that fix makes the VM much less likely
to throw out the VM caches, which would make the debug problem much 
worse).

		Linus
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