Re: negative dentries wasting ram

Oliver Neukum
2002-05-24T08:34:15Z

> as far I can see that negative dentries are not caching anything, they
> should be dropped immediatly, they even slowdown the lookups because
> they're hashed.

They cache things like this:
open("/usr/lib/locale/de_DE+euro/LC_MEASUREMENT", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No
such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/locale/de_DE@euro/LC_MEASUREMENT", O_RDONLY) = 3

Thus they are not really useless, they are just not usefully limited.
Thus IMHO you should look at the swap out path.

Regards
Oliver