linux-ext4 - Re: Inactive memory keep growing and how to release it?

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Date:	Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:48:02 +0800
From:	Lenky Gao <lenky.gao@...il.com>
To:	Lenky Gao <lenky.gao@...il.com>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Inactive memory keep growing and how to release it?

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Zheng Liu <gnehzuil.liu@...il.com> wrote:
> Hi Gao,
> I don't think it is a bug.  If I understand correctly, when you try to
> reclaim memory (sync and drop caches), the test script is still running,
> right?  If so, that means that some memory will be re-dirtied again.  So
> the number of inactive pages could not reduce as you expected.

The test script has stopped.

Some log messages came from my UML Linux as follows:

...
/sdb/file_test
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           182        179          2          0         10         13
-/+ buffers/cache:        155         27
Swap:            0          0          0
/sdb/file_test
^C
[root@...alhost ~]#
[root@...alhost ~]# sync;
[root@...alhost ~]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
[root@...alhost ~]#
[root@...alhost ~]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
[root@...alhost ~]# sync;
[root@...alhost ~]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
[root@...alhost ~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           182        157         25          0          0          3
-/+ buffers/cache:        153         28
Swap:            0          0          0

[root@...alhost ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inac
Inactive:         124756 kB
Inactive(anon):     1408 kB
Inactive(file):   123348 kB
[root@...alhost ~]# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.30.8 #20 Mon Mar 11 07:04:06 EDT 2013
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@...alhost ~]# mount | grep sdb
/dev/ubdb1 on /sdb type ext3 (rw,data=journal)
[root@...alhost ~]# cat ./test_write_disk.sh
#!/bin/bash

while true
do

#       file="/sdb/file_`date +%y%m%d%k%m%s`"
        file="/sdb/file_test"

        echo $file

        dd if=/dev/zero of=${file} bs=512 count=20480 &> /dev/null

#	sync
#	cat /proc/meminfo | grep Inactive\(file\)
	free -m

#        rm -fr ${file}
done

-- 
Regards,

Lenky
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