linux-kernel - Re: How Inactive may be much greather than cached?

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Message-Id: <200710181627.27827.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Date:	Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:27:27 +1000
From:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To:	Vasily Averin <vvs@...ru>
Cc:	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, devel@...nvz.org
Subject: Re: How Inactive may be much greather than cached?

Hi,

On Thursday 18 October 2007 16:24, Vasily Averin wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> could anybody explain how "inactive" may be much greater than "cached"?
> stress test (http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/stress/) that writes into
> removed files in cycle puts the node to the following state:
>
> MemTotal: 16401648 kB
> MemFree: 636644 kB
> Buffers: 1122556 kB
> Cached: 362880 kB
> SwapCached: 700 kB
> Active: 1604180 kB
> Inactive: 13609828 kB
>
> At the first glance memory should be freed on file closing, nobody refers
> to file and ext3_delete_inode() truncates inode. We can see that memory is
> go away from "cached", however could somebody explain why it become
> "invalid" instead be freed? Who holds the references to these pages?

Buffers, swap cache, and anonymous.
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