Re: scsi cmd slab leak? (Was Re: [ck] Anyone been having OOM killer problems lately?)

[Chase Venters <chase.venters@clientec.com>]

On Thursday 19 January 2006 12:13, scientica (GMail) wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, what's the slab? and what is the expected size
> of it? I just checked mine and it seems to eat some 304596 kB
> (2.6.14-ck4, soon 68d uptime). The only problems I've had recently is
> firefox crashing more than it should (but it could simply be me having
> a billion or so windows and tabs open, and it's the
> mozilla-firefox-bin-1.5-r2 from portage which is masked ~amd64, so
> it's probably just buggy - it dies with a segfault after beeing stuck
> at 100% CPU for a while, cant see any OOM-messages anywhere), other
> than that I've been able to both emerge stuff (nice'd though),
> download stuff and burn backups DVD's with out problems -
> simultaneously - and the system was still responsive :)

The slab layer in the kernel is an algorithm that attempts to reserve a sane 
amount of memory for a given highly-used data structure in the kernel. By 
using the slab layer to keep memory reserved and ready, performance-critical 
sections of the kernel code (say, code that receives a packet) doesn't have 
to stop and succeed an allocation before continuing.

Cheers,
Chase
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