From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265352AbUBFDLE (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Feb 2004 22:11:04 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265373AbUBFDLE (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Feb 2004 22:11:04 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:16063 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S265352AbUBFDK7 (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Feb 2004 22:10:59 -0500 Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 19:12:40 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Steve Lord Cc: ak@suse.de, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, kenneth.w.chen@intel.com Subject: Re: Limit hash table size Message-Id: <20040205191240.13638135.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <4021AC9F.4090408@xfs.org> References: <20040205155813.726041bd.akpm@osdl.org.suse.lists.linux.kernel> <4021AC9F.4090408@xfs.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.4 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Steve Lord wrote: > > I have seen some dire cases with the dcache, SGI had some boxes with > millions of files out there, and every night a cron job would come > along and suck them all into memory. Resources got tight at some point, > and as more inodes and dentries were being read in, the try to free > pages path was continually getting called. There was always something > in filesystem cache which could get freed, and the inodes and dentries > kept getting more and more of the memory. There are a number of variables here. Certainly, the old inodes-pinned-by-highmem pagecache will cause this to happen - badly. 2.6 is pretty aggressive at killing off those inodes. What kernel was it? Was it a highmem box? If so, was the filesystem in question placing directory pagecache in highmem? If so, that was really bad on older 2.4: the directory pagecache in highmem pins down all directory inodes.