Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1030461AbVI3WE3 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:04:29 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932599AbVI3WE3 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:04:29 -0400 Received: from zctfs063.nortelnetworks.com ([47.164.128.120]:35738 "EHLO zctfs063.nortelnetworks.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932597AbVI3WE2 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:04:28 -0400 Message-ID: <433DB64B.70405@nortel.com> Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 16:03:55 -0600 From: "Christopher Friesen" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040115 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org CC: Marcelo Tosatti , "Theodore Ts'o" , dipankar@in.ibm.com, viro@ftp.linux.org.uk Subject: Re: dentry_cache using up all my zone normal memory References: <433189B5.3030308@nortel.com> In-Reply-To: <433189B5.3030308@nortel.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-OriginalArrivalTime: 30 Sep 2005 22:04:19.0817 (UTC) FILETIME=[E83C5D90:01C5C60A] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1093 Lines: 27 Friesen, Christopher [CAR:VC21:EXCH] wrote: > With a bit of digging the culprit appears to be the dentry_cache. The > last log I have shows it using 817MB of memory. Right after that the > oom killer kicked me off the system. When I logged back in, the cache > usage was back down to normal and everything was fine. There hasn't been any new suggestions as to the culprit, so I started experimenting a bit. It turns out that if I limit the memory on the system to 896MB, the dcache slab usage peaks at around 600MB and sits there for the duration of the test. When I limit the memory to 1024MB, the dcache slab chews up all my zone normal memory and the oom killer runs. It almost seems like the dcache responds to memory pressure on the system as a whole, but not as well to pressure on zone normal. Would this make sense? Chris - 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/