Re: "Cached" grows and grows and grows...

Alan Cox
2001-09-09T13:30:58Z

> only on "the other side of the street". This is a meminfo from a 2.4.9-ac9
> kernel working one day, and then going crazy on too low mem. "Going crazy" here
> means that kswapd took virtually over the cpu(s) and swapped the hell out the
> machine:
> (BTW you can see that swap did not really grow, but seems to get in and out
> permanently)

That buffers count looks like you have something leaking. Probably a file
system. When kswapd is busy like that it is trying to free buffer cache.
The lack of freeing implies something is still holding those buffer cache
entries in memory.

> You are right: page cache shrunk.
> You are wrong: it does _not_ work, because now buffers increased and obviously
> cannot be shrunk to allow "normal" applications to run. I could not even
> shutdown the machine correctly. It looks like a deadlock in vm to me.

Nope. The VM

> I switched back to Linus' tree, because it does have problems, but is not dead
> within one day.

Thats good, Linus tree currently lasts about 30 minutes for me. I'd be
interested to know what your workload is and what drivers/filesystem you
are using so I can look for leaks.

Alan