Re: Showing /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.stat very slow on some machines

[Bruce Merry <bmerry@ska.ac.za>]

On 18 July 2018 at 17:49, Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 8:37 AM Bruce Merry <bmerry@ska.ac.za> wrote:
>> That sounds promising. Is there any way to tell how many zombies there
>> are, and is there any way to deliberately create zombies? If I can
>> produce zombies that might give me a reliable way to reproduce the
>> problem, which could then sensibly be tested against newer kernel
>> versions.
>>
>
> Yes, very easy to produce zombies, though I don't think kernel
> provides any way to tell how many zombies exist on the system.
>
> To create a zombie, first create a memcg node, enter that memcg,
> create a tmpfs file of few KiBs, exit the memcg and rmdir the memcg.
> That memcg will be a zombie until you delete that tmpfs file.

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll see if I can reproduce the issue. Do
you expect the same thing to happen with normal (non-tmpfs) files that
are sitting in the page cache, and/or dentries?

Cheers
Bruce
-- 
Bruce Merry
Senior Science Processing Developer
SKA South Africa