On Thu 25-10-12 04:57:11, Dave Hansen wrote:
[...]

Here's the problem: Joe Kernel Developer gets a bug report, usually
something like "the kernel is slow", or "the kernel is eating up all my
memory".  We then start going and digging in to the problem with the
usual tools.  We almost *ALWAYS* get dmesg, and it's reasonably common,
but less likely, that we get things like vmstat along with such a bug
report.

Joe Kernel Developer digs in the statistics or the dmesg and tries to
figure out what happened.  I've run in to a couple of cases in practice
(and I assume Michal has too) where the bug reporter was using
drop_caches _heavily_ and did not realize the implications.  It was
quite hard to track down exactly how the page cache and dentries/inodes
were getting purged.

Yes, very same here. Not that I would meet issues like that often but it
happened in the past few times and it was always a lot of burnt time.

There are rarely oopses involved in these scenarios.

The primary goal of this patch is to make debugging those scenarios
easier so that we can quickly realize that drop_caches is the reason our
caches went away, not some anomalous VM activity.  A secondary goal is
to tell the user: "Hey, maybe this isn't something you want to be doing
all the time."

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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