So what is that? A memory leak in kernel? Did anybody else see anything similar?

Everyone see it. It's the kernel caching what's on the disk so it can retrieve it quicker the next time you ask for it. --

eatapple core dump

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 10:14:35PM -0700, Kastus wrote:

Hi,

I'm seeing a strange problem on SuSE 8.2 with kernel k_deflt-2.4.20-100.

This is a Celeron 1.3G 512MB RAM system running 8.2 with all current updates.

After a fresh boot, free reports about 30 MB used. Then, if I run something disk-intensive (e.g. rsync a reiserfs file system on a 20GB partition from one disk to another), used memory grows to about 400MB:

total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 514956 508348 6608 0 29792 60828 -/+ buffers/cache: 417728 97228 Swap: 987988 6736 981252

Another way to cause memory consumption to grow is to run a du command on a relatively big (20GB) filesystem.

What is strange, ps does not show any processes with memory allocated that big.

I'm not using KDE, I run windowmaker and a couple of xterms in it.

Whatever I tried, the memory is not released. I exited from X, I logged out, used memory is still the same and slightly growing.

I was able to reproduce this situation on another 8.2 installation, a dual P3-1G 1GB RAM system, by running a du on a root file system 75GB in size.

I just checked a third system and was not able to reproduce the problem. The third system is still running kernel 2.4.20-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Mon Mar 17 17:56:03 UTC 2003 The second system is actually still running kernel 2.4.20-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Wed Jun 18 07:44:41 UTC 2003 The problem seems to exist in two recent kernel updates for 8.2 Regards, -Kastus

So what is that? A memory leak in kernel? Did anybody else see anything similar?

Everyone see it. It's the kernel caching what's on the disk so it can retrieve it quicker the next time you ask for it. --

eatapple core dump

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 10:14:35PM -0700, Kastus wrote:

Hi,

I'm seeing a strange problem on SuSE 8.2 with kernel k_deflt-2.4.20-100.

This is a Celeron 1.3G 512MB RAM system running 8.2 with all current updates.

After a fresh boot, free reports about 30 MB used. Then, if I run something disk-intensive (e.g. rsync a reiserfs file system on a 20GB partition from one disk to another), used memory grows to about 400MB:

total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 514956 508348 6608 0 29792 60828 -/+ buffers/cache: 417728 97228 Swap: 987988 6736 981252

Another way to cause memory consumption to grow is to run a du command on a relatively big (20GB) filesystem.

What is strange, ps does not show any processes with memory allocated that big.

I'm not using KDE, I run windowmaker and a couple of xterms in it.

Whatever I tried, the memory is not released. I exited from X, I logged out, used memory is still the same and slightly growing.

I was able to reproduce this situation on another 8.2 installation, a dual P3-1G 1GB RAM system, by running a du on a root file system 75GB in size.

I just checked a third system and was not able to reproduce the problem. The third system is still running kernel 2.4.20-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Mon Mar 17 17:56:03 UTC 2003 The second system is actually still running kernel 2.4.20-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Wed Jun 18 07:44:41 UTC 2003 The problem seems to exist in two recent kernel updates for 8.2 Regards, -Kastus