dentry cache grows to really large number on 64bit machine

["Kunal Trivedi" <ktrivedilkml@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I am running 2.6.18 kernel on 64 bit AMD machine. (procinfo attached
at the end of the mail). One of the things I have noticed that
dentry_cache grows really fast under certain code path.
So, far I have not seen any problems, but I would like to get some
more input on this subject. Is it okay for dentry_cache to grow that
much ?

I've run following program for an ~1.00 hour. And my slabinfo shows following.

# cat /proc/slabinfo | grep dentry
dentry_cache      5228333 5228333    224   17    1 : tunables  120
60    8 : slabdata 307549 307549      0


# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      8173080 kB
MemFree:       6787852 kB
Buffers:         42048 kB
Cached:          72616 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:          88608 kB
Inactive:        29796 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:      8173080 kB
LowFree:       6787852 kB
SwapTotal:     2096472 kB
SwapFree:      2096472 kB
Dirty:              48 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:        3716 kB
Mapped:           3336 kB
Slab:          1251292 kB
PageTables:        192 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:  10269552 kB
Committed_AS:    11500 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:      1272 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359737015 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB


int
main()
{
    int fd;
    char fname[] = "/tmp/proc-output-XXXXXX";

    fd = mkstemp(fname);
    close(fd);
    unlink(fname);
    return 0;
}

Please advice,

Thanks
-Kunal