Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: inode cache, dentry cache, buffer heads usage

From: Badari Pulavarty
Date: Mon Mar 14 2005 - 18:02:16 EST


On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 14:11, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 17:47, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > So, why is these slab cache are not getting purged/shrinked even
> > > > under memory pressure ? (I have seen lowmem as low as 6MB). What
> > > > can I do to keep the machine healthy ?
> > >
> > > Tried increasing /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure? (That might not be in
> > > 2.6.8 though).
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Yep. This helped shrink the slabs, but we end up eating up lots of
> > the lowmem in Buffers. Is there a way to shrink buffers ?
>
> It would require some patchwork. Why is it a problem? That memory is
> reclaimable.
>

Well, machine pauses for 5-30 seconds for each vi,cscope, write() etc.
There is 7.5 GB of highmem free, but only 6MB of lowmem.

Just trying to free "lowmem" as much as possible.

> > $ cat /proc/meminfo
> > MemTotal: 16377076 kB
> > MemFree: 7495824 kB
> > Buffers: 1081708 kB
> > Cached: 4162492 kB
> > SwapCached: 0 kB
> > Active: 3660756 kB
> > Inactive: 4473476 kB
> > HighTotal: 14548952 kB
> > HighFree: 7489600 kB
> > LowTotal: 1828124 kB
> > LowFree: 6224 kB
> >
>
> How'd you get 1.8gig of lowmem?

2:2 split

- Badari

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