On 1/3/07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Checking `top` and `ps` revealed that there were no git-svnimport > processes doing anything, but all of my 4G of RAM was still marked as > used by the kernel. I had to do sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 to get it > to free all the RAM that the svn import had used up. I think that was just all cached, and all ok. The reason you didn't see any git-svnimport was that it had died off already, and all your memory was just caches. You could just have left it alone, and the kernel would have started re-using the memory for other things even without any "drop_caches". But what you did there didn't make anything worse, it was just likely had no real impact.
Thought it was worth mentioning this: When I checked top, the numbers it showed me were: Mem: 4059332k total, 3216480k used, 842852k free, 40824k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 37364k cached 40MB in buffers, 37MB in cache, and 3GB used. Seems like *something* was definitely lost there. The 'used' number didn't go down at all when I started doing other things; it went up as the new programs started, then they used up some RAM, and then when they exited they'd free whatever resources they'd used. However, until I did the drop_caches, that number stayed pretty damn big. The system has been up since then, doing lots of things, and still seems pretty stable, so I think it's okay, but I thought that it was worth mentioning that something seemed to be leaky. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html