Hi all, I have seen the following repeatedly, from time to time during the last years, but only today I have probably found a way to trigger it: * create some heavy FS workload on XFS, probably pushing the machine heavily into swap * stop the workload (probably that "make -j" in a big C++ project is not such a good idea after all...) * machine stays slow, as if it had no memory, starts swapping even though there are apparently gigabytes of free memory * free shows there is lots of memory free: susi:~ # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3949728 3583132 366596 0 348 199180 -/+ buffers/cache: 3383604 566124 Swap: 2093052 317460 1775592 * swapoff often fails, even though there should be enough memory according to "free" * slabtop shows there is quite some amount of space in use: Active / Total Objects (% used) : 160024 / 14304077 (1.1%) Active / Total Slabs (% used) : 11111 / 778760 (1.4%) Active / Total Caches (% used) : 117 / 220 (53.2%) Active / Total Size (% used) : 104352.71K / 3073816.64K (3.4%) Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.02K / 0.21K / 4096.00K OBJS ACTIVE USE OBJ SIZE SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME 13434482 0 0% 0.20K 707078 19 2828312K xfs_btree_cur 507270 0 0% 0.39K 50727 10 202908K xfs_efi_item 167297 8 0% 0.22K 9841 17 39364K xfs_buf_item 24752 21011 84% 0.03K 221 112 884K size-32 * there is no way to get rid of this short of unloading the XFS kernel module. Only unmounting the FS's does not help. I guess this is not really a SUSE kernel bug. Where to report this? And has maybe someone else seen something similar? Running FACTORY, 2.6.38-24-desktop (Kernel:HEAD), Thinkpad X200s with 4GB RAM, but I have seen similar things at least two years ago on a then current openSUSE server at home, also x86_64, also XFS. Until today I had guessed it had something to do with sparse files (running lots of kvm guests from images stored on XFS seemed to trigger it sometimes), but today it was clearly triggered by "overload the machine heavily by unbounded make -j", no sparse files involved and no kvm guests running at all. Thanks, seife -- Stefan Seyfried "Dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body!" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+help@opensuse.org