It is still the same in 2.4.17pre2 :-(
On Friday 30 November 2001 10:29, Andrew Morton wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am experiencing a bit of strange system behaviour in a vanilla 2.4.16
> > kernel (2.95.3, very stable machine etc.)
> >
> > I noticed, that after running for a while (day) I had significantly less
> > memory available for my simulation program than right after booting.
> > Looking at the problem using 'xosview' (or 'free'), I noticed that there
> > was a large number of MBs filled with 'buffers' that did not get wiped
> > when other programs need the memory. The system seems to rather kill an
> > 'offender' than clean out buffers.
>
> Seconded. After an updatedb run, my 768 megabyte 2.5.1-pre4 machine
> shows:
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 770668 384460 386208 0 138548 17744
> -/+ buffers/cache: 228168 542500
>
> and, after malloc/memset of 700 megs:
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 770668 73340 697328 0 41160 5960
> -/+ buffers/cache: 26220 744448
> Swap: 499928 18628 481300
>
> I repeated the malloc/memset a few times, wrote a gigabyte file
> and was unable to make the 40 megabytes of buffermem go away.
>
> MemTotal: 770668 kB
> MemFree: 698008 kB
> MemShared: 0 kB
> Buffers: 42092 kB
> Cached: 6088 kB
> SwapCached: 9808 kB
> Active: 48064 kB
> Inactive: 10112 kB
> HighTotal: 0 kB
> HighFree: 0 kB
> LowTotal: 770668 kB
> LowFree: 698008 kB
> SwapTotal: 499928 kB
> SwapFree: 484512 kB
>
> After running an extremely memory-intensive test program for
> two minutes, buffermem fell to 38 megabytes.
>
> Seems broken to me.