Memory abuse with NFS Root filesystem?

Skip Gaede
2002-06-22T20:51:27Z

Folks,

I have a Mac client that's running 2.4.19-pre10, XFree86
(4.2.0) -query + Mozilla 1.0 and losing lots of size-2048
buffers. The rate loss is approximately 1000 buffers/hour,
no reaping of the cache is ever performed, and after 8
hours or so, the system is unusable. I'm seeing this loss
of memory after I boot with an initrd, get an IP address
with dhclient and do a pivot_root onto the read-only NFS
file system.

I can also boot the the client to a bash prompt on the
local hard drive and then run XFree86 -query + Mozilla as
before. Under these conditions, both with and without the
local filesystem mounted RO, the size-2048 buffer
utilization is nominal.

Local boot: slabinfo after 30 minutes:
size-2048 5 50 2048 3 25 1

NFS Root: slabinfo after 15 & 60 minutes
size-2048 187 228 2048 94 114 1 (15 min)
size-2048 918 928 2048 460 464 1 (60 min)

Anyone ever seen or heard of this before? Any thoughts on
how to isolate this to a root cause?

Thanks,
Skip

-------------------------------------------------------