From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754436Ab2DWRTf (ORCPT ); Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:19:35 -0400 Received: from e39.co.us.ibm.com ([32.97.110.160]:58946 "EHLO e39.co.us.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752414Ab2DWRTd (ORCPT ); Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:19:33 -0400 Message-ID: <4F958F13.1000005@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:19:15 -0700 From: Dave Hansen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120313 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.20 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Richard Davies CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Minchan Kim , Wu Fengguang , Balbir Singh , Christoph Lameter , Lee Schermerhorn , Chris Webb , Badari Subject: Re: Over-eager swapping References: <20120423092730.GB20543@alpha.arachsys.com> In-Reply-To: <20120423092730.GB20543@alpha.arachsys.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Content-Scanned: Fidelis XPS MAILER x-cbid: 12042317-4242-0000-0000-0000016DCF2D Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 04/23/2012 02:27 AM, Richard Davies wrote: > # cat /proc/meminfo > MemTotal: 65915384 kB > MemFree: 271104 kB > Buffers: 36274368 kB Your "Buffers" are the only thing that really stands out here. We used to see this kind of thing on ext3 a lot, but it's gotten much better lately. From slabinfo, you can see all the buffer_heads: buffer_head 8175114 8360937 104 39 1 : tunables 0 0 0 : slabdata 214383 214383 0 I _think_ this was a filesystems issue where the FS for some reason kept the buffers locked down. The swapping just comes later as so much of RAM is eaten up by buffers.