[Gluster-devel] GlusterFS Process Growing

[Gordan Bobic]

Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:25:59 +0530, Anand Avati <avati at zresearch.com>
> wrote:
>>> Is there a parameter to limit this cache? And how does this compare to
>>> the normal page cache on the underlying FS?
>> It is not possible to limit this cache as it is decided by the dcache
>> pruning algorithm in the linux kernel vm. You can however force a
>> forget of all the build cache by doing an 'echo 3 >
>> /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'
> 
> Interesting, I thought the drop_caches didn't include the caches that
> reflect in the process size itself. So the 300MB of the resident size of
> glusterfs gets included? I'll have to try this. So, running
> 
> # updatedb
> 
> and/or
> 
> # ls -laR /
> 
> should make it go up to maximum size and not grow much further?

Just tested this. After updatedb and ls -laR the process size is not 
noticeably bigger. Since this would have touched all the files on the 
FS, it seems to indicate that the process growth to 300MB is not driven 
purely by the number of file/directory entries.

On a related note,
# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
did nothing to reduce the size of the glusterfs processes. They remain 
the same size they were before.

Gordan