[rhelv6-list] Kernel memory leak?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 09:49, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> Is anybody else seeing continually-increasing RAM use in RHEL 6?  I'm
> running on x86_64, and it appears the kernel is steadily increasing its
> RAM use.  If I compare process RAM usage to total used RAM, there is a
> big discrepancy:
>
> # ps aux | awk '{x+=$6}END{print x}'
> 319736
> # free
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:       2055296    1791096     264200          0     201512     626996
> -/+ buffers/cache:     962588    1092708
> Swap:      2621432         16    2621416
>
> I looked at "slabtop", and the dentry cache is the culprit:
>
>  OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
> 3078900 3078900 100%    0.19K 153945       20    615780K dentry
>
> Anybody else seeing this?

What is the box doing? How is it set up (ext3, ext4, ?). I haven't
really looked but would want to check with a system that is set up
similarly.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren