David Chinner writes: > On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 03:36:53PM +0100, Ferenc Wagner wrote: > >>David Chinner writes: >> >>> I guess the first thing to find out is whether memory pressure >>> results in freeing the dentries. To simulate memory pressure causing >>> slab cache reclaim, can you run: >>> >>> # echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches >>> >>> and see if the number of dentries and inodes drops. If the number >>> goes down significantly, then we aren't leaking dentries and there's >>> been a change in memoy reclaim behaviour. If it stays the same, then >>> we probably are leaking dentries.... >> >> Thanks for looking into this. There's no real conclusion yet: the >> simulated memory pressure sent the numbers down allright, but >> meanwhile it turned out that this is a different case: on this machine >> the increase wasn't a constant growth, but related to the daily >> updatedb job. I'll reload the original kernel on the original >> machine, and collect the same info if the problem reappers. > > Ok, let me know how it goes when you get a chance. So, the leak is ruled out now. The machine has been running the "leaky" kernel for a week; the inode usage grows, but simulated memory pressure gets it back to normal (to 1k right now). See the graph again: