Rik van Riel wrote:

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Martin J. Bligh wrote:

quoted

quoted

Blockdevices only use ZONE_NORMAL for their pagecache.  That cat will
selectively put pressure on the normal zone (and DMA zone, of course).

Ah, I recall that now. That's fundamentally screwed.

It's not too bad since the data can be reclaimed easily.

The problem in your case is that the dentry and inode cache
didn't get reclaimed. Maybe there is a leak so they can't get
reclaimed at all or maybe they just don't get reclaimed fast
enough.

He had 3 million dentries and only 100k pages on the LRU,
so we should have been reclaiming 60 dentries per scanned
page.

Conceivably the multiply in shrink_slab() overflowed, where
we calculate local variable `delta'.  But doubtful.

First, we need to make it happen again, then see if this (quick
hack) fixes it up.

--- 25/mm/vmscan.c~shrink_slab-overflow	Mon Oct 21 15:40:57 2002
+++ 25-akpm/mm/vmscan.c	Mon Oct 21 15:51:28 2002

@@ -147,14 +147,15 @@ static int shrink_slab(int scanned,  uns
 	list_for_each(lh, &shrinker_list) {
 		struct shrinker *shrinker;
 		int entries;
-		unsigned long delta;
+		long long delta;
 
 		shrinker = list_entry(lh, struct shrinker, list);
 		entries = (*shrinker->shrinker)(0, gfp_mask);
 		if (!entries)
 			continue;
-		delta = scanned * shrinker->seeks * entries;
-		shrinker->nr += delta / (pages + 1);
+		delta = scanned * shrinker->seeks;
+		delta *= entries;
+		shrinker->nr += do_div(delta, pages + 1);
 		if (shrinker->nr > SHRINK_BATCH) {
 			int nr = shrinker->nr;
 

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