From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263596AbTKFNkh (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Nov 2003 08:40:37 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263612AbTKFNkh (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Nov 2003 08:40:37 -0500 Received: from uni02du.unity.ncsu.edu ([152.1.13.102]:42880 "EHLO uni02du.unity.ncsu.edu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263596AbTKFNkc (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Nov 2003 08:40:32 -0500 From: jlnance@unity.ncsu.edu Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 08:40:31 -0500 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Over used cache memory? Message-ID: <20031106134031.GA2720@ncsu.edu> References: <3FAA1056.6020003@aitel.hist.no> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3FAA1056.6020003@aitel.hist.no> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 10:11:50AM +0100, Helge Hafting wrote: > > Yes - _use_ the memory for something else. > 1. All unused memory will be put to good use as cache. > 2. Memory is taken from the cache whenever you need it for > something else, so (1) is not a problem at all. This is the way it is susposed to work, but I am working on a problem where this does not seem to be happening. We have a machine with 6G of ram. It reads some huge files (~5G) and cache fills up. Then it starts to process the data and goes into a swap storm because it can not get any memory for the process because it all is in the cache. If you run top, you see kswapd stuck at the top. If anyone has any ideas about this, I would love to hear them. Thanks, Jim