Hi, I've discovered a strange thing lately. My memory is being sucked out when doing (I suppose) _a lot_ of stat() on the file system. I got left once with ~30MB of ram (of 512 in total) which made my system trash like hell. You might try doing the following to reproduce the effect:
$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches $ vmstat # write down the result $ du -s -x /lots/of/files # keep it running for a minute $ echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches $ vmstat # write it down too The latter vmstat should report less memory then the previous one. (sum up free+buff+cache) Is this an expected behaviour ? If yes, please explain. The memory can be magically freed by umount-ing the partition that was scanned or by deleting the files that were stat()-ed. However, one cannot simply umount "/". Note: Make sure you point 'du' to a place where you have dozens of files, so it can keep it running for a minute or more. I can confirm that to be an issue to 2.6.23-rc6 and 2.6.23-rc7. A friend of mine reports that 2.6.22.5 produces same results. Tested on jfs and ext3. Regards, Michał Kazior. PS. I'm not subscribed to the list, so CC me please. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
