From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Neil Horman Subject: Re: NFS using too much memory on diskless system Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:38:12 -0500 Message-ID: <421DD8C4.6080702@redhat.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Cc: nfs@lists.sourceforge.net Received: from sc8-sf-mx2-b.sourceforge.net ([10.3.1.12] helo=sc8-sf-mx2.sourceforge.net) by sc8-sf-list2.sourceforge.net with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1D4JCZ-0006Sn-Hp for nfs@lists.sourceforge.net; Thu, 24 Feb 2005 05:38:47 -0800 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([66.187.233.31]) by sc8-sf-mx2.sourceforge.net with esmtp (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.41) id 1D4JCF-0003bm-NR for nfs@lists.sourceforge.net; Thu, 24 Feb 2005 05:38:47 -0800 To: Gareth Glaccum In-Reply-To: Sender: nfs-admin@lists.sourceforge.net Errors-To: nfs-admin@lists.sourceforge.net List-Unsubscribe: , List-Id: Discussion of NFS under Linux development, interoperability, and testing. List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , List-Archive: Gareth Glaccum wrote: > Hi, > I have a diskless system built and am having weird issues with the way > NFS client is working. I am using SLES 9.0 with the stock kernel > (2.6.5-7.111-30 I think from memory). > I have mounted an NFS partition from another machine without any issues. > However, when I use anything to write to the partition (for example, see > later) the system uses memory to cache the files as I am mounted over GbE. > However, the machine is not limiting the memory used at all. In fact, it > is using so much it is crashing the machine or causing other programs to > be OOM'd. > > To recreate the problem, the following command took the machine out in > less than 3 seconds dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/NFSMOUNT bs=1024k count=4000 > The machine has 4GB of memory and is using around 300Mb for its OS all > told. > Is there some way of limiting the NFS cache size like there used to be > in the 2.4 kernel? (see section B7 of the nfs FAQ I believe) > > Any ideas gratefully received, > Gareth > It sounds to me your kernel has some sort of vm bug, but if you want to shrink page cache usage, you may want to play with the dirty_vm_* settings in /proc/sys/vm. I'm still getting used to the 2.6 sysctls, but I believe that those settings allow you to specify when your kernel decides its under sufficient memory pressure to start moving data back to disk. HTH Neil > _________________________________________________________________ > It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! > http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide > Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. > Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click > _______________________________________________ > NFS maillist - NFS@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nfs -- /*************************************************** *Neil Horman *Software Engineer *Red Hat, Inc. *nhorman@redhat.com *gpg keyid: 1024D / 0x92A74FA1 *http://pgp.mit.edu ***************************************************/ ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ NFS maillist - NFS@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nfs