Re: Inactive memory keep growing and how to release it?

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On 03/14/2013 06:14 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Mon 04-03-13 17:52:22, Lenky Gao wrote:
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:
How did you try to reclaim the memory? How much memory is still free?
Are you above watermaks (/proc/zoneinfo will tell you more)

# 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.
This could be related to the memory fragmentation and your kernel seem
to be too large to have memory compaction which helps a lot in that
area.

Can you give some tips to avoid this?
One way would be to increase /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes which will
enlarge watermaks so the reclaim starts sooner.
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
This is really an old kernel and also a distribution one which might
contain a lot of patches on top of the core kernel. I would suggest to
contact Redhat or try to reproduce the issue with the vanilla and

What's the meaning of vanilla?

up-to-date kernel and report here.

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