Problem in Page Cache Replacement

metin d
2012-11-20T17:42:45Z

I have two PostgreSQL databases named data-1 and data-2 that sit on the same machine. Both databases keep 40 GB of data, and the total memory available on the machine is 68GB.

I started data-1 and data-2, and ran several queries to go over all their data. Then, I shut down data-1 and kept issuing queries against data-2. For some reason, the OS still holds on to large parts of data-1's pages in its page cache, and reserves about 35 GB of RAM to data-2's files. As a result, my queries on data-2 keep hitting disk.

I'm checking page cache usage with fincore. When I run a table scan query against data-2, I see that data-2's pages get evicted and put back into the cache in a round-robin manner. Nothing happens to data-1's pages, although they haven't been touched for days.

Does anybody know why data-1's pages aren't evicted from the page cache? I'm open to all kind of suggestions you think it might relate to problem.

This is an EC2 m2.4xlarge instance on Amazon with 68 GB of RAM and no swap space. The kernel version is:

$ uname -r
3.2.28-45.62.amzn1.x86_64
Edit:

and it seems that I use one NUMA instance, if  you think that it can a problem.

$ numactl --hardware
available: 1 nodes (0)
node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
node 0 size: 70007 MB
node 0 free: 360 MB
node distances:
node   0
0:  10