From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail202.messagelabs.com (mail202.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.227]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC1D06B0047 for ; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:57:07 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <4B71927D.6030607@nortel.com> Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:51:09 -0600 From: "Chris Friesen" MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: tracking memory usage/leak in "inactive" field in /proc/meminfo? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Rik van Riel , Linux Kernel Mailing List , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: Hi, I'm hoping you can help me out. I'm on a 2.6.27 x86 system and I'm seeing the "inactive" field in /proc/meminfo slowly growing over time to the point where eventually the oom-killer kicks in and starts killing things. The growth is not evident in any other field in /proc/meminfo. I'm trying to figure out where the memory is going, and what it's being used for. As I've found, the fields in /proc/meminfo don't add up...in particular, active+inactive is quite a bit larger than buffers+cached+dirty+anonpages+mapped+pagetables+vmallocused. Initially the difference is about 156MB, but after about 13 hrs the difference is 240MB. How can I track down where this is going? Can you suggest any instrumentation that I can add? I'm reasonably capable, but I'm getting seriously confused trying to sort out the memory subsystem. Some pointers would be appreciated. Thanks, Chris -- 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