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Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 11:07:27 -0700
From: Andreas Dilger <adilger@clusterfs.com>
To: Roman Dementiev <dementiev@mpi-sb.mpg.de>
Cc: linux-kernel mailing list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: buffer leakage in kernel?
Message-ID: <20030124110727.N12662@schatzie.adilger.int>
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In-Reply-To: <3E31364E.F3AFDCF0@mpi-sb.mpg.de>; from dementiev@mpi-sb.mpg.de on Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 01:49:18PM +0100
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On Jan 24, 2003  13:49 +0100, Roman Dementiev wrote:
> I've met with following problem (kernel 2.4.20-pre4 ):
> I write and read sequentially from/to 8 files each of 64 Gbytes (not a
> mistake, 64 Gbyte),
> each on different disk. The files are opened with flag O_DIRECT. I have
> 1 Gbyte RAM, no swap.
> While this scanning is running, number of "buffers" reported by ''free"
> and in /proc/meminfo
> is continuously increasing up to ~ 500 MB !! When the program exits
> normally or I break it, number
> of "buffers" does not decrease and even increases if I do operations on
> other files.
> 
> This is not nice at all when I have another applications running
> with memory consumption > 500 MB: when my "scanner" approaches 50G
> border on each disk, I've got numerous  "Out of memory" murders :(.
> Even 'ssh' to this machine is killed :(

There was a bug in vanilla 2.4.18 related to O_DIRECT that is fixed in the
RH kernel, but I don't know when/if it was merged into the main kernel.
As always, testing with the most recent kernel (2.4.21-pre3 currently)
will tell you whether that bug has been fixed already or not.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/

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