From: Vasily Averin Subject: How Inactive may be much greather than cached? Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 10:24:04 +0400 Message-ID: <4716FC04.6070107@sw.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=KOI8-R Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: devel@openvz.org To: Linux Kernel Mailing List , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from mailhub.sw.ru ([195.214.233.200]:20310 "EHLO relay.sw.ru" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753612AbXJRGYM (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:24:12 -0400 Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org Hi all, could anybody explain how "inactive" may be much greater than "cached"? stress test (http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/stress/) that writes into removed files in cycle puts the node to the following state: MemTotal: 16401648 kB MemFree: 636644 kB Buffers: 1122556 kB Cached: 362880 kB SwapCached: 700 kB Active: 1604180 kB Inactive: 13609828 kB At the first glance memory should be freed on file closing, nobody refers to file and ext3_delete_inode() truncates inode. We can see that memory is go away from "cached", however could somebody explain why it become "invalid" instead be freed? Who holds the references to these pages? thank you, Vasily Averin