Suni, you do know it much better - is not is strange a little? (so many ext3 
inode chache objects, togetrher with 3 GB of cached disk space).

But I dont see anything wrong below - big 'cached' memory means only 'you have 
so many unused memory that system cached files in it' and nothing more. Cached 
memory is in reality _free for immediate use_ memory (can be used by anyone 
immediately).

What ysstem is doing is _instead of freeing memory and filling it by zerous, 
free unused memory and fill it in by buffer cache data, so that if someone need 
these data he have them at once. If someone need more memory, system reuse any 
of 'chached' memory without any delay (because these are buffers which are 
already written to the disk or which was never udpated).

Big 'cached' value means only _big free memory_.

  ----- O  riginal Message ----- 
  From: Luis Freitas 
  To: Alexei_Roudnev ; Brian Sieler ; [email protected] 
  Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 4:32 PM
  Subject: Re: [Ocfs2-users] High on buffers and deep on swap


  Alexei,

     How can I relate the information on slabtop to the actual memory used by 
buffers?

     I see this on slabtop:

   Active / Total Objects (% used)    : 603822 / 649643 (92.9%)
   Active / Total Slabs (% used)      : 47216 / 47216 (100.0%)
   Active / Total Caches (% used)     : 97 / 133 (72.9%)
   Active / Total Size (% used)       : 176601.08K / 181508.49K (97.3%)
   Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.01K / 0.28K / 128.00K
    OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
  202461 202451  99%    0.54K  28923        7    115692K ext3_inode_cache
  232206 232153  99%    0.15K   8931       26     35724K dentry_cache
   29974  26092  87%    0.27K   2141       14      8564K radix_tree_node
   68250  62400  91%    0.05K    910       75      3640K buffer_head
     855    855 100%    4.00K    855        1      3420K pmd
     647    647 100%    4.00K    647        1      2588K size-4096
    8595   7694  89%    0.25K    573       15      2292K filp
   20835  17331  83%    0.09K    463       45      1852K vm_area_struct
     780    767  98%    2.00K    390        2      1560K size-2048
   18849   7962  42%    0.06K    309       61      1236K size-64
    2440    632  25%    0.50K    305        8      1220K size-512
    2926   2889  98%    0.34K    266       11      1064K inode_cache
     256    256 100%    3.00K    128        2      1024K biovec-(256)
     600    592  98%    1.38K    120        5       960K task_struct
     515    512  99%    1.38K    103        5       824K pirpIo
    5084   2365  46%    0.12K    164       31       656K size-128


    The largest area is about 100Mb, but on free there are over 3Gb on the 
"cached" column:

  [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ free
               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:       5190736    4461420     729316          0     141836    3265464
  -/+ buffers/cache:    1054120    4136616
  Swap:      2048248          0    2048248
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$


  Regards,
  Luis



  Alexei_Roudnev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
    Did you run slabtop ? It can show unreleased buffers in the system.

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Luis Freitas 
      To: Alexei_Roudnev ; Brian Sieler ; [email protected] 
      Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 2:29 PM
      Subject: Re: [Ocfs2-users] High on buffers and deep on swap


      Alexei,

        Yes, it seems to have no effect, which too is very strange. On 2.4 
vm.freepages had a very easy to notice effect.

         There are other people having problems with buffers not being released 
on the list and some of them are forcing the kernel cache to be flushed with:

      echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

          But I dont see this parameter on RHAS 4.0.

           Also, to be fair this seems to be a generic VM issue, I see this on 
servers that are not running ocfs2 too. And I only see this behavior on 
machines with more than 2Gb of memory.

      Regards,
      Luis

      Regards,
      Luis

      Alexei_Roudnev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
        Did you tried vm.swappiness parameter?

        (/proc/sys/vm/swappiness)

          ----- 
          Original Message ----- 
          From: Brian Sieler 
          To: 'Luis Freitas' ; [email protected] 
          Sent: Sunday, April 08, 2007 10:52 PM
          Subject: RE: [Ocfs2-users] High on buffers and deep on swap


          Luis, yes I am experiencing what appears to be a similar problem you 
are describing. See my post from just a few minutes ago on another thread.
           
          I run a 2-node cluster with OCFS2/RAC on 2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp (RHEL 
4.0) as well.
           
                       total       used       free     shared    buffers     
cached
          Mem:       4044496    4005516      38980          0      34108    
2236636
          -/+ buffers/cache:    1734772    2309724
          Swap:      2097144     648244    1448900
           
          If you've uncovered anything since posting this message, please pass 
it along?
           

----------------------------------------------------------------------

          From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Luis 
Freitas
          Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 5:32 PM
          To: [email protected]
          Subject: [Ocfs2-users] High on buffers and deep on swap
           
          Hi,
           
             This is a bit off topic, hope there is not a problem.
           
             Anyone out there experiencing high swapping with the kernel 
retaining a large amount of buffers? This used to be a problem on 2.4, and I 
usually changed /proc/sys/vm/freepages to fix it. But on 2.6 this parameter no 
longer exists.
           
              One of the servers here is holding over 3.5Gb of cache even when 
using over 700Mb of swap, and free memory is always low.
           
          [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ free
                       total       used       free     shared    buffers     
cached
          Mem:       5190736    4810880     379856          0     143032    
3583868
          -/+ buffers/cache:    1083980    4106756
          Swap:      2048248     723064    1325184
          [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$
             I am tuning /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but this seems to have no 
effect at all. Changed from 60 to 10 and seems to have no effect. The server 
runs Oracle RAC with OCFS2.
           
          Regards,
          Luis
           
           
            

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