2.6.36-rc2 : slabtop report 10170292 size-32 objects...

[Paul Rolland <rol@as2917.net>]

Hello,

I was surprised to see my machine using so much swap when I couldn't find
where all the memory was gone, and I checked quickly what slabtop had to
say, and found that one :

  OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME                   
10172288 10171996  99%    0.03K  90824      112    363296K size-32

That makes is 10M active "size-32" entries ? but what is that ? What is
using the "size-32" ? And it this normal to see that on a laptop with 4G
RAM which is only running X, KDE, Compiz+emerald, +/-10 xterms and a
firefox which is closed as soon as it is no more used.

Before you ask :
[root@tux proc]# zgrep SLAB /proc/config.gz 
CONFIG_SLAB=y
CONFIG_SLABINFO=y
# CONFIG_DEBUG_SLAB is not set
[root@tux proc]# uptime
 11:34:50 up 6 days, 20:30, 13 users,  load average: 1.42, 1.35, 1.23

so that may limit the actions or informations I can collect, but any
details you want, please feel free to ask.

Regards,
Paul