Re: File caching?

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On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 01:16:57PM -0600, Michael McGlothlin wrote:
> I was going to store the cached copy on a RAM disk as many of the files are

Note that it probably won't help you that much, the kernel usually does
quite good job at caching reads (but, specific situations like extensive
writes can starve it - which ramdisk solution would avoid as it is
completely manually controlled. Only way to know it is to test it)

> larger than the 1MB limit of memlockd and I don't feel like coming up with
> my own solution if I can avoid it.
> 
> Is there a way to know how much RAM is being used for file cache or to tell

free(1) will tell you (look at "cached" column). Note that programs you
"load" from disk are also actually executed directly from that page cache
(without making any separate copy). Also, the writes (unless being done with
O_DIRECT or such) will go to that same cache before they're flushed to disk
(which is usually what you want, as subsequent reads can then be satisfied
from cache, and the application issuing writes gets control much sooner than
if it would wait for writes to complete to disk).

> it to use more? If the server has 128GB of RAM and typically uses half of
> that for it's actual work will it use the rest as file cache? Likewise is

Yes, it will use (almost) ALL otherwise unused RAM (the "free" column in
free(1) means "unused" or "wasted" if you like) for cache. The "almost" is
because there is some very small amount reserved by /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes 
(but you don't want to touch it, it is too small to give you any benefit, and 
your kernel might die if you set it too low).

> there a way to track/test if file stats are being pushed out of cache a lot?

Uh, dunno for something elegant. You can track /proc/meminfo and
/proc/slabinfo (for example by free(1) and slabtop(1) or manually of course)
and look how they change.

Note that there are other users of memory (see "slabtop -s c"). For example,
especially if you have lots of small files and/or directories, then dentry,
inode and related fs cache structures can eat significant amounts of RAM. 
You can tune priority of expiration of those with /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure 
(you might also want to look in your kernel docs for rest of /proc/sys/vm)

There are also vmstat(8), iostat(1) and blktrace(8) which might help you
track actual I/O, and you can compare that with actual data read from your
program logs for example to see how well the cache performs.


-- 
Opinions above are GNU-copylefted.

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