Kernel eating memory, ends up trashing

[Rik van Riel]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Dag Wieers wrote:

> 	MemTotal:        61676 kB
> 	MemFree:           596 kB

> 	Active:           4912 kB
> 	Inact_dirty:      1104 kB
> 	Inact_laundry:     528 kB
> 	Inact_clean:       964 kB

Oh dear, that is only 8MB free&pageable memory, out of 61MB
total available memory after bootup...

> Is there anything I can try to help you find the cause ? This machine
> has only ext3 and jbd loaded (that match other machines with the same
> problems).

Exactly which kernel are you running ?

I wonder if there's some leak in reclaiming ext3 pages
after a truncate. Maybe they get erroneously removed
from the pageout lists and we never find them...

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan