Re: [Bug 9182] Critical memory leak (dirty pages)

[Krzysztof Oledzki <olel@ans.pl>]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:46:36 +0100 (CET) Krzysztof Oledzki <olel@ans.pl> wrote:
>
> > > > > Which filesystem, which mount options
> > > >
> > > >   - ext3 on RAID1 (MD): / - rootflags=data=journal
> > >
> > > It wouldn't surprise me if this is specific to data=journal: that
> > > journalling mode is pretty complex wrt dairty-data handling and isn't well
> > > tested.
> > >
> > > Does switching that to data=writeback change things?
> >
> > I'll confirm this tomorrow but it seems that even switching to
> > data=ordered (AFAIK default o ext3) is indeed enough to cure this problem.
>
> yes, sorry, I meant ordered.

OK, I can confirm that the problem is with data=journal. With data=ordered 
I get:

# uname -rns;uptime;sync;sleep 1;sync ;sleep 1; sync;grep Dirty /proc/meminfo
Linux cougar 2.6.24-rc5
 17:50:34 up 1 day, 20 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.99, 0.48, 0.35
Dirty:               0 kB

> > Two questions remain then: why system dies when dirty reaches ~200MB
>
> I think you have ~2G of RAM and you're running with
> /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio=10, yes?
>
> If so, when that machine hits 10% * 2G of dirty memory then everyone who
> wants to dirty pages gets blocked.

Oh, right. Thank you for the explanation.

> > and what is wrong with ext3+data=journal with >=2.6.20-rc2?
>
> Ah.  It has a bug in it ;)
>
> As I said, data=journal has exceptional handling of pagecache data and is
> not well tested.  Someone (and I'm not sure who) will need to get in there
> and fix it.

OK, I'm willing to test it. ;)

Best regrds,

				Krzysztof Olędzki