linux-kernel - [BUG?] without memory pressure negative dentries overpopulate dcache

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Date:   Wed, 5 Jun 2019 16:51:38 +0300
From:   Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@...dex-team.ru>
To:     linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>
Subject: [BUG?] without memory pressure negative dentries overpopulate dcache

I've seen problem on large server where horde of negative dentries
slowed down all lookups significantly:

watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#25 stuck for 22s! [atop:968884] at __d_lookup_rcu+0x6f/0x190

slabtop:

   OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
85118166 85116916   0%    0.19K 2026623       42  16212984K dentry
16577106 16371723   0%    0.10K 425054       39   1700216K buffer_head
935850 934379   0%    1.05K  31195       30    998240K ext4_inode_cache
663740 654967   0%    0.57K  23705       28    379280K radix_tree_node
399987 380055   0%    0.65K   8163       49    261216K proc_inode_cache
226380 168813   0%    0.19K   5390       42     43120K cred_jar
  70345  65721   0%    0.58K   1279       55     40928K inode_cache
105927  43314   0%    0.31K   2077       51     33232K filp
630972 601503   0%    0.04K   6186      102     24744K ext4_extent_status
   5848   4269   0%    3.56K    731        8     23392K task_struct
  16224  11531   0%    1.00K    507       32     16224K kmalloc-1024
   6752   5833   0%    2.00K    422       16     13504K kmalloc-2048
199680 158086   0%    0.06K   3120       64     12480K anon_vma_chain
156128 154751   0%    0.07K   2788       56     11152K Acpi-Operand

Total RAM is 256 GB

These dentries came from temporary files created and deleted by postgres.
But this could be easily reproduced by lookup of non-existent files.

Of course, memory pressure easily washes them away.

Similar problem happened before around proc sysctl entries:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/10/47

This one does not concentrate in one bucket and needs much more memory.

Looks like dcache needs some kind of background shrinker started
when dcache size or fraction of negative dentries exceeds some threshold.