Re: Large slab cache in 2.6.1

Linus Torvalds
2004-02-22T02:58:33Z

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
>
> Forcing paging will push this down to acceptable levels but it's a
> really irritating solution --- I'm still trying to think of a better
> way to stop the dentries from using such a disproportionate amount of
> memory.

Why?

It's quite likely that especially on a fairly idle machine, the dentry
cache really _should_ be the biggest single memory user.

Why? Because an idle machine tends to largely be dominated by things like
"updatedb" and friends running. If there isn't any other real activity,
there's no reason for a big page cache, nor is there anything that would
put memory pressure on the dentries, so they grow as much as they can.

Do you see any actual bad behaviour from this?

Linus