Re: inode cache, dentry cache, buffer heads usage

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 17:47, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > So, why is these slab cache are not getting purged/shrinked even
> > >  under memory pressure ? (I have seen lowmem as low as 6MB). What
> > >  can I do to keep the machine healthy ?
> > 
> > Tried increasing /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure?  (That might not be in
> > 2.6.8 though).
> > 
> > 
> 
> Yep. This helped shrink the slabs, but we end up eating up lots of
> the lowmem in Buffers. Is there a way to shrink buffers ?

It would require some patchwork.  Why is it a problem?  That memory is
reclaimable.

> $ cat /proc/meminfo
> MemTotal:     16377076 kB
> MemFree:       7495824 kB
> Buffers:       1081708 kB
> Cached:        4162492 kB
> SwapCached:          0 kB
> Active:        3660756 kB
> Inactive:      4473476 kB
> HighTotal:    14548952 kB
> HighFree:      7489600 kB
> LowTotal:      1828124 kB
> LowFree:          6224 kB
> 

How'd you get 1.8gig of lowmem?