From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:44:56 -0400 From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: VM balancing issues on 2.6.13: dentry cache not getting shrunk enough Message-ID: <20050914224456.GA32082@thunk.org> References: <20050911105709.GA16369@thunk.org> <20050913084752.GC4474@in.ibm.com> <20050913215932.GA1654338@melbourne.sgi.com> <200509141101.16781.ak@suse.de> <4327EA6B.6090102@colorfullife.com> <20050914024313.1e70f2a3.akpm@osdl.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050914024313.1e70f2a3.akpm@osdl.org> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Andrew Morton Cc: Manfred Spraul , ak@suse.de, dgc@sgi.com, bharata@in.ibm.com, dipankar@in.ibm.com, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 02:43:13AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > Manfred Spraul wrote: > > > > One tricky point are directory dentries: As far as I see, they are > > pinned and unfreeable if a (freeable) directory entry is in the cache. > > > > Well. That's the whole problem. > > I don't think it's been demonstrated that Ted's problem was caused by > internal fragementation, btw. Ted, could you run slabtop, see what the > dcache occupancy is? Monitor it as you start to manually apply pressure? > If the occupancy falls to 10% and not many slab pages are freed up yet then > yup, it's internal fragmentation. The next time I can get my machine into that state, sure, I'll try it. I used to be able to reproduce it using normal laptop usage patterns (Lotus notes running under wine, kernel builds, apt-get upgrade's, openoffice, firefox, etc.) about twice a week with 2.6.13-rc5, but with 2.6.13, it happened once or twice, but since then I haven't been able to trigger it. (Predictably, not after I posted about it on LKML. :-/) I've been trying a few things in the hopes of deliberately triggering it, but so far, no luck. Maybe I should go back to 2.6.13-rc5 and see if I have an easier time of reproducing the failure case. - Ted -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org