Dave Hansen <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 11:37 -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote: >> > I'm worried that there are users out there experiencing real problems >> > that aren't reporting it because "workarounds" like this just paper over >> > the issue. >> >> For what it is worth. I had a friend ask me about a system that had 50% >> of it's memory consumed by slab caches. 20GB out of 40GB. The kernel >> was suse? 2.6.27 so it's old, but if you are curious. >> /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches does nothing in that case. > > Was it the reclaimable caches doing it, though? The other really common > cause is kmalloc() leaks. It was reclaimable caches. He kept seeing the cache sizes of the problem caches shrink. On an idle system he said he was seeing about 16MB/min getting free or something like that. Something that would take hours and hours before things freed up. I asked and my friend told me that according to slabtop the slab with the most memory used kept changing dramatically and he could not see a pattern. So at least on one old kernel on one strange workload there was a problem. Eric -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>