Subject: Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: inode cache, dentry cache, buffer heads usage
From: Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Cc: ext2-devel <ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050314141128.7da95c34.akpm@osdl.org>
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Date: 14 Mar 2005 14:13:15 -0800
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On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 14:11, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 17:47, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com> 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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