Kernel eating memory, ends up trashing

[Dag Wieers]

On 19 Sep 2003, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 18:30, Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > > Exactly which kernel are you running ?
> > 
> > 2.4.20-19.9 currently, but I have the same effect with 2.4.20-18 and 
> > 2.4.20-20. The graph is exactly the same as it was weeks ago (every 2 
> > weeks this happens, only this time the system was responsive enough to 
> > return the information ;)
> 
> We recently found one problem which could affect the size of the inode
> cache.  It's not exactly a leak, because the resources can still be
> reclaimed, but the inodes were filed away in a place where the VM was
> least likely to go looking to reclaim them.
> 
> Could you "cat /proc/slabinfo" on the affected systems and see what the
> inode_cache entry looks like, please?

The system has been rebooted 2 days ago. The effect will be much bigger if 
I at least wait a week.

This is what I pasted earlier on Rik's request:

|	> Do you have anything suspicious in /proc/slabinfo when your                                                                        
|	> system gets close to crashing ?                                                                                                    
|                                                                                                                                     
|	It's now up 7 days (36MB used, 25MB free) so we'll see in another                                                                    
|	5 days. These are the higher numbers:                                                                                                
|                                                                                                                                    
|	        inode_cache          812   1232    480  154  154    1                                                                        
|	        dentry_cache         572   1380    128   46   46    1                                                                        
|	        filp                 620    630    128   21   21    1                                                                        
|	        buffer_head         4349  12363    100  162  317    1                                                                        
|	        mm_struct           6038   6069    224  356  357    1                                                                        
|	        vm_area_struct      1315   4920     96   38  123    1                                                                        
|	        pte_chain            729   3277     32   14   29    1                                                                        
|                                                                                                                                     
|	I'm not sure what I have to look for. I guess I better save this also                                                                
|	directly after booting up.       

I'll give you some other numbers later. If there's some more stuff you 
need from that system just before it is trashing, please tell now ;)

Thanks,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]