2.2.14 buffer/page cache leak?

From: Rafal Boni (rafal.boni@metatel.com)
Date: Fri Apr 21 2000 - 13:40:32 EST


[Please CC me on any replies, as I've been overwhelmed by the amount of
 traffic on the list, so I'm no longer subscribed...]

Folks:
        I've got a 512MB x86 box running lots of traffic through it and am
        seeing some wierd buffer/page cache behaviour. A couple of times over
        the last few days, I've had the network stack fail allocating SKB's
        due to the fact that ~ 40+% of physical memory is being use for the
        buffer cache.

        These specific runs, I was running with debug logging turned on in
        my server, so I generated probably 10GB of logs overnight. Also,
        due to the load placed on the system, my server process grew to ~
        200MB (that part, at least, was expected 8-). Of notable interest
        was the fact that killing the server process, sync'ing the FS and
        then blowing away all the logs didn't make the situation any better.

        Should I have 200+MB of buffer cache on a system that is mostly doing
        logging to disk (other than misc. linux system processes and a monitor
        script that dumped stats once a minute, no other processes where
        running on the box, so nothing should have been reading from the disk
        at any noticable rate)??

        More importantly, should SKB allocation be able to force pages out of
        the buffer/page cache(s) so it didn't fail? I would expect so, but
        I'm a relative linux kernel newbie.

Any info appreciated,
--rafal

----
Rafal Boni                                              rafal.boni@metatel.com
  PGP key C7D3024C, print EA49 160D F5E4 C46A 9E91  524E 11E0 7133 C7D3 024C

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