From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 1 Aug 2001 18:04:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 1 Aug 2001 18:04:36 -0400 Received: from h24-64-71-161.cg.shawcable.net ([24.64.71.161]:59384 "EHLO webber.adilger.int") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 1 Aug 2001 18:04:25 -0400 From: Andreas Dilger Message-Id: <200108012204.f71M4Bo0007352@webber.adilger.int> Subject: Re: repeated failed open()'s results in lots of used memory [Was: [Fwd: memory consumption]] In-Reply-To: <3B686D73.6040602@starentnetworks.com> "from Brian Ristuccia at Aug 1, 2001 04:58:27 pm" To: Brian Ristuccia Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 16:04:10 -0600 (MDT) CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, djohnson@starentnetworks.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL87 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org You write: > We've been experiencing a problem where an errant process would run in a > tight loop trying to create files in a directory where it did not have > access. While this errant process was running, we'd notice all of the > available memory shift from buffers/cache (or free) to used and stay > that way while the process was running. vmstat also reports heavy in/out > traffic on the swap, but swap consumption does not grow past a few dozen > megabytes. The memory used by the process itself does not grow. > > Note that we increase the default values for certain FS parameters: > > echo '16384' >/proc/sys/fs/super-max > echo '32768' >/proc/sys/fs/file-max > echo '65535' > /proc/sys/fs/inode-max You are probably creating negative dentries. Check /proc/slabinfo for the number of dentries, and it will confirm this. I'm not sure why that would cause swapping, but then again I haven't checked the policy for shrinking the dentry cache recently, and there have been a number of changes in that area lately. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto, \ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?" http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert