From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Don Porter Subject: Re: ext3 leaking buffer_heads Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:04:25 -0500 Message-ID: <49C9D779.4030805@cs.utexas.edu> References: <49C7E959.4010000@cs.utexas.edu> <49C80685.9060800@redhat.com> <49C961FE.1030704@cs.utexas.edu> <20090325004609.GF32307@mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Eric Sandeen , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Theodore Tso Return-path: Received: from mail.cs.utexas.edu ([128.83.139.10]:53853 "EHLO mail.cs.utexas.edu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754951AbZCYHFo (ORCPT ); Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:05:44 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20090325004609.GF32307@mit.edu> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Theodore Tso wrote: > The journal is a fixed sized, circular log, so the buffer_head will be > reused eventually. In the case of memory pressure the unreferenced > buffer_head will be freed, but since we never reference the contents > of the journal, we could be more aggressive about freeing the > buffer_head just to avoid pushing out more valuable memory contents > when we start getting put under memory pressure. > > - Ted > Thanks Ted. This makes sense. I am working on a research project that may require more aggressive reclaiming of these buffer_heads. If I were to implement something, would this be an optimization the maintainers would be interested in? Thanks again for the help, Don