Hi,
I've discovered a strange thing lately. My memory is being sucked out
when doing (I suppose) _a lot_ of stat() on the file system. I got left
once with ~30MB of ram (of 512 in total) which made my system trash
like hell. You might try doing the following to reproduce the effect:
$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
$ vmstat # write down the result
$ du -s -x /lots/of/files # keep it running for a minute
$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
$ vmstat # write it down too
The latter vmstat should report less memory then the previous one.
(sum up free+buff+cache) Is this an expected behaviour ? If yes,
please explain.
The memory can be magically freed by umount-ing the partition that was
scanned or by deleting the files that were stat()-ed. However, one
cannot simply umount "/".
Note: Make sure you point 'du' to a place where you have dozens of
files, so it can keep it running for a minute or more.
I can confirm that to be an issue to 2.6.23-rc6 and 2.6.23-rc7.
A friend of mine reports that 2.6.22.5 produces same results.
Tested on jfs and ext3.
Regards,
Michał Kazior.
PS. I'm not subscribed to the list, so CC me please.
Micha? Kazior <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've discovered a strange thing lately. My memory is being sucked out
> when doing (I suppose) _a lot_ of stat() on the file system. I got left
> once with ~30MB of ram (of 512 in total) which made my system trash
> like hell. You might try doing the following to reproduce the effect:
>
> $ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> $ vmstat # write down the result
> $ du -s -x /lots/of/files # keep it running for a minute
> $ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> $ vmstat # write it down too
RTFM: Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
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