Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 3 Jan 2002 19:46:10 +0100 | From | José Luis Domingo López <> | Subject | Re: Suspected bug in shrink_caches() |
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On Wednesday, 02 January 2002, at 22:38:40 -0700, Sasha Pachev wrote:
> I am quite sure there is still a bug in shrink_caches(), at least there was > one in 2.4.17-rc2. I have not tried later releases, but there is nothing in > the changelog about the fixes anywhere near that area of the code, so I have > to assume the problem is still there. > [...] > When we get to the point where free memory starts running low, even though we > may have something like 100 MB of cache, shrink_caches() fails to free up > enough memory, which triggers the evil oom killer. Obviously, in the above > situation the correct behaviour is to go on cache diet before considering the > murders. > I can confirm this behaviour in my own machine. 128 MB of RAM, swap space turned off, machine running KDE 2.2.x, Konqueror, rxvt's, gkrellm, xmms and some daemons, and mighty Mozilla :). At this point there are still a couple of MB free, a couple buffered and aproximately 40 MB in caches.
Trying to load OpenOffice641 the kernel feels it's OOM time, and kills something, usually Mozilla (as it should). However, "watch cat /proc/meminfo" reports about 30 MB in caches when OOM kicks in. Any attempt to "tune" parameters under "/proc/sys/vm/" changes nothing. Attempted changes include: echo "0 0" > /proc/sys/vm/pagetable_cache
All this is with plain 2.4.17, no patches applied. Another thing I have observed is caches growing "too" much, but this is more of a subjective feeling than anything else.
Maybe unrelated, maybe not, is the fact that in 2.4.17 I still see short "freezes" in interactive response after doing intensive disk access (untarring something, finishing some dd'ing, rebuilding Debian package database, etc.). Both on medium-end hardware (128 MB RAM, PIII 600) and low-end hardware (64 MB RAM, P166). Vanilla 2.4.17 on both, with ext2 as the only filesystem used in mounted partitions.
-- José Luis Domingo López Linux Registered User #189436 Debian Linux Woody (P166 64 MB RAM) jdomingo AT internautas DOT org => Spam at your own risk
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