From: Eric Sandeen Subject: Re: ext4_alloc_context occupies 150 GiB of memory and makes the system unusable Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:45:51 -0600 Message-ID: <4CEA902F.9040706@redhat.com> References: <201011221323.25342.bartoschek@or.uni-bonn.de> <4CEA8B4A.3030608@redhat.com> <201011221637.58275.bartoschek@or.uni-bonn.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Christoph Bartoschek Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:44609 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750829Ab0KVPpy (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Nov 2010 10:45:54 -0500 In-Reply-To: <201011221637.58275.bartoschek@or.uni-bonn.de> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 11/22/10 9:37 AM, Christoph Bartoschek wrote: ... > I see the problem for the first time and I do not know whether it is > reproducable. We have several similar machines with similar workloads but none > has shown such a problem till now. > > I'm going to reboot the machine. If it shows the problem again I will try a > newer kernel and then the patch. > > Some workload will be lost, but the machine did not do anything useful for > three days now :) at some point somebody needs to look at the slab cache management, I think; even if ext4 is (ab)using this cache, having that much memory unreclaimable in inactive caches is clearly a bug somewhere...! -Eric