From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932152AbWIGQer (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Sep 2006 12:34:47 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932212AbWIGQer (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Sep 2006 12:34:47 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:7656 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932152AbWIGQep (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Sep 2006 12:34:45 -0400 Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 09:34:17 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Guennadi Liakhovetski Cc: sct@redhat.com, adilger@clusterfs.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [2.6.18-rc6] ext3 memory leak Message-Id: <20060907093417.54d2adf1.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.7 (GTK+ 2.8.6; 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 On Thu, 7 Sep 2006 17:21:35 +0200 (CEST) Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote: > On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote: > > > I've reported before in thread "[2.6.17.4] slabinfo.buffer_head increases" a > > memory leak in ext3. Today I verified it is still present in 2.6.18-rc6. > > No, sorry, I cannot seem to reproduce it under -rc6. It seems to stabilize > eventually. But it doesn't under -rc2. I looked through all commits to > ext3 code between -rc2 and -rc6 and I don't see any obvious reasons why a > memory leak may have been fixed. Unless somebody can sched some light on > this, I'll try to upgrade the problematic system to -rc6 tomorrow. > > Just to be quite sure - this cannot (or is very unlikely to) be a libc > bug, right? > It is expected that in this situation the number of buffer_head objects will be approximately equal to the number of pagecache pages. So once the pagecache has grown to consume all available memory and the kernel starts to perform pagecache reclaim, the buffer_head count should stabilise.