From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Fri, 24 May 2002 04:34:15 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Fri, 24 May 2002 04:34:14 -0400 Received: from mailout10.sul.t-online.com ([194.25.134.21]:23781 "EHLO mailout10.sul.t-online.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id convert rfc822-to-8bit; Fri, 24 May 2002 04:34:14 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: Oliver Neukum To: Andrea Arcangeli , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: negative dentries wasting ram Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:34:33 +0200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.4] Cc: Linus Torvalds , Alexander Viro In-Reply-To: <20020524071657.GI21164@dualathlon.random> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Message-Id: <200205311034.33771.oliver@neukum.name> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > as far I can see that negative dentries are not caching anything, they > should be dropped immediatly, they even slowdown the lookups because > they're hashed. They cache things like this: open("/usr/lib/locale/de_DE+euro/LC_MEASUREMENT", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/locale/de_DE@euro/LC_MEASUREMENT", O_RDONLY) = 3 Thus they are not really useless, they are just not usefully limited. Thus IMHO you should look at the swap out path. Regards Oliver