Re: dentry_cache using up all my zone normal memory

Christopher Friesen
2005-09-30T22:04:29Z

Friesen, Christopher [CAR:VC21:EXCH] wrote:

> With a bit of digging the culprit appears to be the dentry_cache. The
> last log I have shows it using 817MB of memory. Right after that the
> oom killer kicked me off the system. When I logged back in, the cache
> usage was back down to normal and everything was fine.

There hasn't been any new suggestions as to the culprit, so I started
experimenting a bit.

It turns out that if I limit the memory on the system to 896MB, the
dcache slab usage peaks at around 600MB and sits there for the duration
of the test.

When I limit the memory to 1024MB, the dcache slab chews up all my zone
normal memory and the oom killer runs.

It almost seems like the dcache responds to memory pressure on the
system as a whole, but not as well to pressure on zone normal. Would
this make sense?

Chris