Re: negative dentries wasting ram

Alexander Viro
2002-05-24T19:04:27Z

On Fri, 24 May 2002, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> > I might buy that argument if we didn't also leave around _unreferenced_
> > inodes for minutes in the icache. And _that_ is much stronger source of
>
> I don't see it, at the last iput of an inode with i_nlink == 0 the inode
> is freed immediatly, not like the dcache that is left floating around as
> a negative one with no useful caching effects for most workloads.

Right. Now look at the inodes with i_nlink != 0. And realize that they'd
already gone through the aging in dcache - if they get to the point of
final iput(), they have no references remaining. And _after_ that they
happily stay in icache for minutes.