linux-kernel - Re: Over-eager swapping

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Message-ID: <4F958F13.1000005@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Date:	Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:19:15 -0700
From:	Dave Hansen <dave@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Richard Davies <richard@...chsys.com>
CC:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>,
	Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@...el.com>,
	Balbir Singh <balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@...com>,
	Chris Webb <chris@...chsys.com>, Badari <pbadari@...ibm.com>
Subject: Re: Over-eager swapping

On 04/23/2012 02:27 AM, Richard Davies wrote:
> # cat /proc/meminfo
> MemTotal:       65915384 kB
> MemFree:          271104 kB
> Buffers:        36274368 kB

Your "Buffers" are the only thing that really stands out here.  We used
to see this kind of thing on ext3 a lot, but it's gotten much better
lately.  From slabinfo, you can see all the buffer_heads:

buffer_head       8175114 8360937    104   39    1 : tunables    0    0
   0 : slabdata 214383 214383      0

I _think_ this was a filesystems issue where the FS for some reason kept
the buffers locked down.  The swapping just comes later as so much of
RAM is eaten up by buffers.

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