On Tue 12-07-16 16:56:32, Matthias Dahl wrote: > Hello Michal... > > On 2016-07-12 16:07, Michal Hocko wrote: > > > /proc/slabinfo could at least point on who is eating that memory. > > Thanks. I have made another test (and thus again put the RAID10 out of > sync for the 100th time, sigh) and made regular snapshots of slabinfo > which I have attached to this mail. > > > Direct IO doesn't get throttled like buffered IO. > > Is buffered i/o not used in both cases if I don't explicitly request > direct i/o? > > dd if=/dev/zero /dev/md126p5 bs=512K > and dd if=/dev/zero /dev/mapper/test-device bs=512K OK, I misunderstood your question though. You were mentioning the direct IO earlier so I thought you were referring to it here as well. > Given that the test-device is dm-crypt on md125p5. Aren't both using > buffered i/o? Yes they are. > > the number of pages under writeback was more or less same throughout > > the time but there are some local fluctuations when some pages do get > > completed. > > The pages under writeback are those directly destined for the disk, so > after dm-crypt had done its encryption? Those are submitted for the IO. dm-crypt will allocate a "shadow" page for each of them to perform the encryption and only then submit the IO to the storage underneath see http://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.LRH.2.02.1607121907160.24806@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > > If not you can enable allocator trace point for a particular object > > size (or range of sizes) and see who is requesting them. > > If that support is baked into the Fedora provided kernel that is. If > you could give me a few hints or pointers, how to properly do a allocator > trace point and get some decent data out of it, that would be nice. You need to have a kernel with CONFIG_TRACEPOINTS and then enable them via debugfs. You are interested in kmalloc tracepoint and specify a size as a filter to only see those that are really interesting. I haven't checked your slabinfo yet - hope to get to it later today. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>