quoted

quoted

Maybe you didn't cat /dev/sda2 for long enough?

Well, it's a multi-gigabyte partition. IIRC, I just ran it until
it died with "input/output error" ... which I assumed at the time
was the end of the partition, but it should be able to find that
without error, so maybe it just ran out of ZONE_NORMAL ;-)

Oh.  Well it should have just hit eof.  Maybe you have a dud
sector and it terminated early.

OK, I catted an 18Gb disk completely. The beast still didn't shrink.

larry:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:     16078192 kB
MemFree:      15043280 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:         79152 kB
Cached:         287248 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         263056 kB
Inactive:       105136 kB
HighTotal:    15335424 kB
HighFree:     15039616 kB
LowTotal:       742768 kB
LowFree:          3664 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:           3736 kB
Slab:           641352 kB
Reserved:       570000 kB
Committed_AS:     2400 kB
PageTables:        180 kB
ReverseMaps:      2236

ext2_inode_cache  476254 541125    416 60125 60125    1 :  120   
dentry_cache      2336272 2336280    160 97345 97345    1 :  248  124

Note that dentry cache seems to have grown overnight ....

I guess I'll add some debug code to the slab cache shrinkers
and try to see what it's doing.

M.
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