From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from digeo-nav01.digeo.com (digeo-nav01.digeo.com [192.168.1.233]) by packet.digeo.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with SMTP id XAA05159 for ; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:21:02 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <3DB4EE4E.88311B7B@digeo.com> Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:21:02 -0700 From: Andrew Morton MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: ZONE_NORMAL exhaustion (dcache slab) References: <3DB4D20A.8A579516@digeo.com> <2629107186.1035240598@[10.10.2.3]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "Martin J. Bligh" Cc: Rik van Riel , linux-kernel , linux-mm mailing list List-ID: "Martin J. Bligh" wrote: > > > Oh it's reproduceable OK. Just run > > > > make-teeny-files 7 7 > > Excellent - thanks for that ... will try it. When it goes stupid, you can then run and kill some big memory-hog to force reclaim of lots of highmem pages. Once you've done that, you can watch the inode cache fall away as the inodes which used to have pagecache become reclaimable. > > Maybe you didn't cat /dev/sda2 for long enough? > > Well, it's a multi-gigabyte partition. IIRC, I just ran it until > it died with "input/output error" ... which I assumed at the time > was the end of the partition, but it should be able to find that > without error, so maybe it just ran out of ZONE_NORMAL ;-) Oh. Well it should have just hit eof. Maybe you have a dud sector and it terminated early. > > Perhaps we need to multiply the slab cache scanning pressure by the > > slab occupancy. That's simple to do. > > That'd make a lot of sense (to me, at least). I presume you mean > occupancy on a per-slab basis, not global. It's already performing slab cache scanning proportional to the size of the slab. Multiplied by the rate of page scanning. But I'm thinking that this linear pressure isn't right at either end of the scale, so it needs to become nonlinear - even less pressure when there's little slab, and more pressure when there's a lot. So multiply the slab scanning ratio by amount_of_slab/amount_of_normal_zone. Maybe. -- 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/