Re: Large slab cache in 2.6.1

[Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>]

Mike Fedyk wrote:

> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>
>> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>>
>>>> Similar issue here; I ran out of filp's/whatever shortly after 
>>>> booting.
>>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 06:03:14PM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:
>>
>>> So Nick Piggin's VM patches won't help with this?
>>
>>
>>
>> I think they're in -mm, and I'd call the vfs slab cache shrinking stuff
>> a vfs issue anyway because there's no actual VM content to it, apart
>> from the code in question being driven by the VM.
>
>
> Hmm, that's news to me.  Maybe that's a newer patch.  I haven't been 
> reading the list much for the last month or so...
>
> Nick had a patch that was supposed to help 2.6 with low memory 
> situations to bring it on a par with 2.4 in that respect.  ISTR 
> "active recycling" being mentioned about it...
>

Just an aside, it is hard to get 2.6 "on par" with 2.4 because 2.6 is
often much fairer (although it can still be badly unfair - if we ever
want to fix that we'd probably need per process mm).

There are quite a lot sorts of low memory situations you can get into.
My (and Nikita's) patches don't help the one you're probably in. They
don't put more pressure on slab.