Re: VM balancing issues on 2.6.13: dentry cache not getting shrunk enough

[Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 02:17:52PM +0530, Bharata B Rao wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 11:16:36PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 05:30:46PM +0530, Dipankar Sarma wrote:
> > > Do you have the /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state output when such lowmem
> > > shortage happens ?
> > 
> > Not yet, but the situation occurs on my laptop about 2 or 3 times
> > (when I'm not travelling and so it doesn't get rebooted).  So
> > reproducing it isn't utterly trivial, but it's does happen often
> > enough that it should be possible to get the necessary data.
> > 
> > > This is a problem that Bharata has been investigating at the moment.
> > > But he hasn't seen anything that can't be cured by a small memory
> > > pressure - IOW, dentries do get freed under memory pressure. So
> > > your case might be very useful. Bharata is maintaing an instrumentation
> > > patch to collect more information and an alternative dentry aging patch 
> > > (using rbtree). Perhaps you could try with those.
> > 
> > Send it to me, and I'd be happy to try either the instrumentation
> > patch or the dentry aging patch.
> > 
> 
> Ted,
> 
> I am sending two patches here.
> 
> First is dentry_stats patch which collects some dcache statistics
> and puts it into /proc/meminfo. This patch provides information 
> about how dentries are distributed in dcache slab pages, how many
> free and in use dentries are present in dentry_unused lru list and
> how prune_dcache() performs with respect to freeing the requested
> number of dentries.

Bharata, 

Ideally one should move the "nr_requested/nr_freed" counters from your
stats patch into "struct shrinker" (or somewhere else more appropriate
in which per-shrinkable-cache stats are maintained), and use the
"mod_page_state" infrastructure to do lockless per-CPU accounting. ie.
break /proc/vmstats's "slabs_scanned" apart in meaningful pieces.

IMO something along that line should be merged into mainline to walk
away from the "what the fuck is going on" state of things.