linux-kernel - Re: inode leak in 2.6.24?

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Message-ID: <87fxvny9ru.fsf@szonett.ki.iif.hu>
Date:	Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:36:53 +0100
From:	Ferenc Wagner <wferi@...f.hu>
To:	David Chinner <dgc@....com>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: inode leak in 2.6.24?

David Chinner <dgc@....com> writes:

> The xfs inodes are clearly pinned by the dentry cache, so the issue
> is dentries, not inodes. What's causing dentries not to be
> reclaimed?  I can't see anything that cold pin them (e.g. no filp's
> that would indicate open files being responsible), so my initial
> thoughts are that memory reclaim may have changed behaviour.
>
> I guess the first thing to find out is whether memory pressure
> results in freeing the dentries. To simulate memory pressure causing
> slab cache reclaim, can you run:
>
> # echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
>
> and see if the number of dentries and inodes drops. If the number
> goes down significantly, then we aren't leaking dentries and there's
> been a change in memoy reclaim behaviour. If it stays the same, then
> we probably are leaking dentries....

Hi Dave,

Thanks for looking into this.  There's no real conclusion yet: the
simulated memory pressure sent the numbers down allright, but
meanwhile it turned out that this is a different case: on this machine
the increase wasn't a constant growth, but related to the daily
updatedb job.  I'll reload the original kernel on the original
machine, and collect the same info if the problem reappers.
-- 
Regards,
Feri.
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