On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 11:01:52AM -0600, Josh Grebe wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I have a server farm made of identical hardware running pop3 and imap mail
> functions. recently, we upgraded all the machines to kernel 2.4.2, but we
> noticed that according to free, our memory utilization went way up. Here
> is the output of free on the 2.4.2 machine:
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 513192 492772 20420 0 1684 263188
> -/+ buffers/cache: 227900 285292
> Swap: 819304 540 818764
>
>
> On the 2.2..18 machine:
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 517256 351280 165976 19920 82820 186836
> -/+ buffers/cache: 81624 435632
> Swap: 819304 0 819304
>
>
> Doing the math, the 2.4 machine is using 44% of available memory, while
> the 2.2 is using only about 14%.
What does /proc/slabinfo report for the number of pages locked down in
the inode and dentry caches? My machine has pretty much every inode in
memory and is using close to 50% of my memory for these (214MB/512MB).
These caches do not seem to be counted towards 'reclaimable' memory by
the new VM and are only pruned when _all_ other attempts to free up
memory have failed.
This becomes very noticeable on a not very fast, small memory machine
(i.e. 48MB sparc-IPC), where 2.2 stays relatively snappy, but 2.4
becomes unusable after an updatedb run.
Jan
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