Hi Gao,
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 02:58:24PM +0800, 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): 554662 kB
> ...
> #cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(fi
> Inactive(file): 882824 kB
>
> and i cannot reclaim it:
>
> # cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(file\);
> Inactive(file): 882824 kB
> # sync;
> # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> # cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(file\);
> Inactive(file): 777664 kB
>
> My file system type is ext3, mounted with the option data=journal and
> it is easy to reproduce. If the mount option is data=ordered,
> reproducing this problom need more time. Because of the problom, when
> in the final situation, i cannot kmalloc a larger contiguous memory,
> especially in interrupt context. I have tested on other version
> kernel, such as 2.6.30 and 3.6.11, the problom also exists.
>
> Is this a bug?
I don't think it is a bug. If I understand correctly, when you try to
reclaim memory (sync and drop caches), the test script is still running,
right? If so, that means that some memory will be re-dirtied again. So
the number of inactive pages could not reduce as you expected.
Regards,
- Zheng
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