Re: Large slab cache in 2.6.1

Chris Wedgwood
2004-02-22T02:36:40Z

On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 04:50:34PM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:

> I have 1.5 GB of ram in this system that will be a Linux Terminal
> Server (but using Debian & VNC). There's 600MB+ anonymous memory,
> 600MB+ slab cache, and 100MB page cache. That's after turning off
> swap (it was 400MB into swap at the time).

I have a similar annoying problem... I have a machine which is almost
always idle (single user work station type thing) with 1.5GB of RAM
and I end up with 850M in slab!

For me the main problem seems to be driven by dentry_cache itself
bloating up really big and those entries keep fs-specific memory
pinned.

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.

I'm played with -mm kernels and various patches out there... nothing
seems to put enough pressure on the slab unless I force paging.

akpm, riel --- any (more) ideas here?