[Gluster-users] Old story - glusterfs memory usage

Krzysztof Strasburger strasbur at chkw386.ch.pwr.wroc.pl
Mon Mar 29 10:36:38 UTC 2010


On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 12:35:32PM +0530, Shehjar Tikoo wrote:
> Krzysztof Strasburger wrote:
> >On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:48:44AM +0530, Shehjar Tikoo wrote:
> >>This is a known problem. See a previous email on the devel list about it 
> >>at:
> >>http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.gluster.devel/1469
> >>
> >>A bug is filed is at:
> >>http://bugs.gluster.com/cgi-bin/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=545
> >>
> >>For more info on the drop_caches mentioned in that gluster-devel thread, 
> >>see:
> >>http://www.linuxinsight.com/proc_sys_vm_drop_caches.html
> >>
> >>Do let us know if dropping caches as shown in that thread helps.
> >Dear Shehjar,
> >thank you, but drop_caches really is not the Holy Grail of this problem. 
> >It simply does not change anything, to set it to something != 0.
> >Amon Ott figured it out, that forget() is called, but memory is not freed
> >anyway. 
> 
> Of course, just doing drop_caches is not the silver bullet here. In some 
> cases, it needs to be preceded by a sync. What is your experience with that?
> 
> In any case, if Ott is right, then we might have a memory leak. The best 
> step is to file a bug.
Shehjar - I have sent the response to your private mail; sorry for that.
Syncing is IMHO irrelevant here, as there are no dirty buffers to be
written out to fs. The files are only opened, stated and closed.
I filed related bug report in ancient days, when the bug database was hosted on
savannah. If I remember correctly, it has been closed in the meantime. 
Should I file a new report, or find the old one and reopen it (if it is closed)?
Krzysztof




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