On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 01:56:18PM -0700, Roman Gushchin wrote: > I’d be happy to join this discussion. And in my opinion it’s going > beyond negative dentries: there are other types of objects which tend > to grow beyond any reasonable limits if there is no memory pressure. > > A perfect example when it happens is when a machine is almost idle > for some period of time. Periodically running processes creating > various kernel objects (mostly vfs cache) which over time are filling > significant portions of the total memory. And when the need for memory > arises, we realize that the memory is heavily fragmented and it’s > costly to reclaim it back. When you say "vfs cache", do you mean page cache, inode cache, or something else?