Relieving lowmem pressure on a highmem box, 2.4

Ian Soboroff (ian.soboroff@nist.gov)
Wed, 25 Jun 2003 15:43:11 -0400


I have a Dell server with 12GB of RAM in it which is having a lot of
trouble with lowmem pressure. wli's bloatmeter script shows that it's
a lot of buffer-heads and inodes.

$ bloatmost | head -4
buffer_head: 191316KB 211893KB 90.28
inode_cache: 64813KB 66097KB 98.5
size-64: 82KB 10871KB 0.75
size-32: 95KB 5694KB 1.68

$ cat /proc/slabinfo | sort -k 2,2n | tail
size-512 1052 1176 512 132 147 1 : 124 62
dentry_cache 1068 2580 128 86 86 1 : 252 126
blkdev_requests 1200 1200 128 40 40 1 : 252 126
filp 1230 1230 128 41 41 1 : 252 126
size-32 1532 91118 64 42 1571 1 : 252 126
pte_chain 2466 13050 128 157 435 1 : 252 126
size-128 2946 3450 128 115 115 1 : 252 126
vm_area_struct 3192 4830 128 138 161 1 : 252 126
inode_cache 129503 132195 512 18885 18885 1 : 124 62
buffer_head 2043732 2260200 96 56450 56505 1 : 252 126

What's a good solution for this? I'm not ready to move to 2.5, since
stability is pretty important for us, but patching 2.4 should be OK.
The current kernel is RedHat's 2.4.20-18.8 (SMP, BIGMEM; HIGHMEM
option set to 64GB).

Thanks in advance,
Ian

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