slab/kernel memory problem

[Alexander Lazarevich]

Nevermind. Turns out the system will release the slab memory no problem, 
it's a bad malloc call that causes the problem. Nothing wrong with slab.

Alex

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Alexander Lazarevich wrote:

> We have a RHEL4-AS 64bit system, and a FC364bit system. Both running most 
> recent kernels.
>
> We've got bad memory problems. The kernel is sucking up quite a bit of 
> memory, check out Slab in meminfo:
>
> [root at hostname ~]# cat /proc/meminfo
> MemTotal:      8078596 kB
> MemFree:        486480 kB
> Buffers:       1075532 kB
> Cached:         527284 kB
> SwapCached:       1384 kB
> Active:        2120352 kB
> Inactive:      1019628 kB
> HighTotal:           0 kB
> HighFree:            0 kB
> LowTotal:      8078596 kB
> LowFree:        486480 kB
> SwapTotal:     2096472 kB
> SwapFree:      2053372 kB
> Dirty:              28 kB
> Writeback:           0 kB
> Mapped:        1564776 kB
> Slab:          4424180 kB
> CommitLimit:   6135768 kB
> Committed_AS:  1836712 kB
> PageTables:       9952 kB
> VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
> VmallocUsed:      1356 kB
> VmallocChunk: 34359736951 kB
> HugePages_Total:     0
> HugePages_Free:      0
> Hugepagesize:     2048 kB
>
>
> Then, slabtop is showing what is using all that slab mem:
>
> Active / Total Objects (% used)    : 9028210 / 9033666 (99.9%)
> Active / Total Slabs (% used)      : 1105829 / 1105834 (100.0%)
> Active / Total Caches (% used)     : 94 / 135 (69.6%)
> Active / Total Size (% used)       : 108142.02K / 108819.82K (99.4%)
> Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.02K / 0.01K / 128.00K
>
>  OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
> 4181455 4181452  99%    0.78K 836291        5   3345164K ext3_inode_cache
> 4129011 4129007  99%    0.23K 242883       17    971532K dentry_cache
>
> Why in the heck is the system trying to use all this memory to cache ext3 
> inodes? This happens on both FC364bit and RHEL4-AS64bit.
>
> I've search google and bugzilla, couldn't find anything.
>
> Anyone see this as well?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Alex
>
>
>
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