Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756910Ab3CDMVl (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Mar 2013 07:21:41 -0500 Received: from mail-wi0-f196.google.com ([209.85.212.196]:54678 "EHLO mail-wi0-f196.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756660Ab3CDMV1 (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Mar 2013 07:21:27 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <51347A6E.8010608@iskon.hr> References: <51347A6E.8010608@iskon.hr> Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 20:21:25 +0800 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Inactive memory keep growing and how to release it? From: Lenky Gao To: Zlatko Calusic Cc: Greg KH , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "devel@linuxdriverproject.org" , "olaf@aepfle.de" , "apw@canonical.com" , "andi@firstfloor.org" , "akpm@linux-foundation.org" , "linux-mm@kvack.org" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1630 Lines: 49 2013/3/4 Zlatko Calusic : > > The drop_caches mechanism doesn't free dirty page cache pages. And your bash > script is creating a lot of dirty pages. Run it like this and see if it > helps your case: > > sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches Thanks for your advice. The inactive memory still cannot be reclaimed after i execute the sync command: # cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(file\); Inactive(file): 882824 kB # sync; # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(file\); Inactive(file): 777664 kB I find these page becomes orphaned in this function, but do not understand why: /* * If truncate cannot remove the fs-private metadata from the page, the page * becomes orphaned. It will be left on the LRU and may even be mapped into * user pagetables if we're racing with filemap_fault(). * * We need to bale out if page->mapping is no longer equal to the original * mapping. This happens a) when the VM reclaimed the page while we waited on * its lock, b) when a concurrent invalidate_mapping_pages got there first and * c) when tmpfs swizzles a page between a tmpfs inode and swapper_space. */ static int truncate_complete_page(struct address_space *mapping, struct page *page) { ... My file system type is ext3, mounted with the opteion data=journal and it is easy to reproduce. -- Regards, Lenky -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/