Message-ID: <4B69DAAB.9070301@nortel.com>
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:20:59 -0600
From: "Chris Friesen" <cfriesen@nortel.com>
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To: Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Need help tracking down memory consumption increase
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I'm seeing a slow increase in memory consumption and I'm trying to
narrow down the possible causes.

In my test, I got the system into steady-state and then started
monitoring /proc/meminfo.

After 14 hrs:
MemFree had dropped by 594MB.
Active + Inactive + Slab increased by 594MB
Buffers + Cached + AnonPages + Mapped + Slab increased by 290MB

The other categories in /proc/meminfo didn't change significantly.

I've done some experimenting and it seems that pages allocated in the
kernel via alloc_page() and friends don't show up in /proc/meminfo
except that they're deducted from the MemFree category.  Specifically,
they don't seem to show up in the Active/Inactive category.  Can someone
confirm this?

Given the above, what types of pages are in Active/Inactive other than
Buffers + Cached + AnonPages + Mapped?

Thanks,

Chris
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