Re: Unexpected growth of the LRU inactive list

[Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>]

On Wed 13-07-16 15:19:05, Michal Hocko wrote:
> [CC ext/jbd experts]

Thanks.

> On Wed 13-07-16 01:48:57, Houssem Daoud wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I was testing the filesystem performance of my system using the following
> > script:
> > 
> > #!/bin/bash
> > while true;
> > do
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=output.dat  bs=100M count=1
> > done
> > 
> > I noticed that after some time, all the physical memory is consumed by the
> > LRU inactive list and only 120 MB are left to the system.
> > /proc/meminfo shows the following information:
> > MemTotal: 4021820 Kb
> > MemFree: 121912 Kb
> > Active: 1304396 Kb
> > Inactive: 2377124 Kb
> > 
> > The evolution of memory utilization over time is available in this link:
> > http://secretaire.dorsal.polymtl.ca/~hdaoud/ext4_journal_meminfo.png
> > 
> > With the help of a kernel tracer, I found that most of the pages in the
> > inactive list are created by the ext4 journal during a truncate operation.
> > The call stack of the allocation is:
> > [
> > __alloc_pages_nodemask
> > alloc_pages_current
> > __page_cache_alloc
> > find_or_create_page
> > __getblk
> > jbd2_journal_get_descriptor_buffer
> > jbd2_journal_commit_transaction
> > kjournald2
> > kthread
> > ]
> > 
> > I can't find an explanation why the LRU is growing while we are just writing
> > to the same file again and again. I know that the philosophy of memory
> > management in Linux is to use the available memory as much as possible, but
> > what is the need of keeping truncated pages in the LRU if we know that they
> > are not even accessible ?
> > 
> > Thanks !
> > 
> > ps: My system is running kernel 4.3 with ext4 filesystem (journal mode)

This problem should be fixed by commit bc23f0c8d7cc "jbd2: Fix unreclaimed
pages after truncate in data=journal mode" which was merged into 4.4.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR

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