Used Memory Not Clearing Down On Redhat Machines.

Eris Caffee eris-redhat-list at eldalin.com
Fri Aug 12 15:16:46 UTC 2005


> 15:20:33  up 14 days,  2:16,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
> 49 processes: 48 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
>            total    0.8%    0.0%    0.2%   0.0%     0.6%    0.0%  198.4%
>            cpu00    0.0%    0.0%    0.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%  100.0%
>            cpu01    0.8%    0.0%    0.2%   0.0%     0.6%    0.0%   98.4%
> Mem:  3599032k av, 2926964k used,  672068k free,       0k shrd,   82052k
> buff
>                     469844k actv, 1731916k in_d,   54940k in_c
> Swap: 2044072k av,       0k used, 2044072k free                 2614264k
> cached

You have an awful lot of memory in the in_d state.  That is "Inactive
Dirty".  There's a description of it and the other memory states (for 2.4
kernels at least) here:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/
Pages in the inactive dirty state ought to be getting flushed out to disk,
but it looks like this isn't happening.

I'm no kernel expert, but it seems to me that something is causing the
kernel not to properly launder the inactive dirty memory.  This could be a
kernel bug, so if you are sure you don't have any hung processes that
could be holding the memory open, you should check to see if there is a
newer kernel available for your system.

Of course, you should also double check to make sure there really isn't
some process from the analysis job still running and holding all of this
memory open.

Eris Caffee





More information about the redhat-list mailing list