From: Nick Piggin Subject: Re: How Inactive may be much greather than cached? Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:27:27 +1000 Message-ID: <200710181627.27827.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> References: <4716FC04.6070107@sw.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="koi8-r" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, devel@openvz.org To: Vasily Averin Return-path: Received: from smtp102.mail.mud.yahoo.com ([209.191.85.212]:35384 "HELO smtp102.mail.mud.yahoo.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1751439AbXJRG1z (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:27:55 -0400 In-Reply-To: <4716FC04.6070107@sw.ru> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org Hi, On Thursday 18 October 2007 16:24, Vasily Averin wrote: > 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? Buffers, swap cache, and anonymous.