From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail203.messagelabs.com (mail203.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.243]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8603E6B0169 for ; Sun, 21 Aug 2011 04:56:21 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:56:14 +0100 From: Chris Webb Subject: Host where KSM appears to save a negative amount of memory Message-ID: <20110821085614.GA3957@arachsys.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: kvm@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org We're running KSM on kernel 2.6.39.2 with hosts running a number qemu-kvm virtual machines, and it has consistently been saving us a useful amount of RAM. To monitor the effective amount of memory saved, I've been looking at the difference between /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing and pages_shared. On a typical 32GB host, this has been coming out as at least a hundred thousand or so, which is presumably half to one gigabyte worth of 4k pages. However, this morning we've spotted something odd - a host where pages_sharing is smaller than pages_shared, giving a negative saving by the above calculation: # cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing 1099994 # cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_shared 1761313 I think this means my interpretation of these values must be wrong, as I presumably can't have more pages being shared than instances of their use! Can anyone shed any light on what might be going on here for me? Am I misinterpreting these values, or does this look like it might be an accounting bug? (If the latter, what useful debug info can I extract from the system to help identify it?) Best wishes, Chris. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: email@kvack.org