From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from psmtp.com (na3sys010amx190.postini.com [74.125.245.190]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CE2586B0002 for ; Mon, 4 Mar 2013 04:52:24 -0500 (EST) Received: by mail-wi0-f194.google.com with SMTP id hm11so832692wib.5 for ; Mon, 04 Mar 2013 01:52:23 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 17:52:22 +0800 Message-ID: Subject: Inactive memory keep growing and how to release it? From: Lenky Gao Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Greg KH , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "devel@linuxdriverproject.org" , "olaf@aepfle.de" , "apw@canonical.com" , "andi@firstfloor.org" , "akpm@linux-foundation.org" , "linux-mm@kvack.org" Hi, When i just run a test on Centos 6.2 as follows: #!/bin/bash while true do file="/tmp/filetest" echo $file dd if=/dev/zero of=${file} bs=512 count=204800 &> /dev/null sleep 5 done the inactive memory keep growing: #cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(fi Inactive(file): 420144 kB ... #cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(fi Inactive(file): 911912 kB ... #cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(fi Inactive(file): 1547484 kB ... and i cannot reclaim it: # cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(fi Inactive(file): 1557684 kB # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(fi Inactive(file): 1520832 kB I have tested on other version kernel, such as 2.6.30 and .6.11, the problom also exists. When in the final situation, i cannot kmalloc a larger contiguous memory, especially in interrupt context. Can you give some tips to avoid this? PS: # uname -a Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Dec 6 19:48:22 GMT 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux -- Regards, Lenky -- 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