Re: Sudden and massive page cache eviction

From: Pekka Enberg
Date: Wed Nov 24 2010 - 12:46:35 EST


Hi Peter,

2010/11/24 Peter Schüller <scode@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>> I forgot to address the second part of this question: How would I best
>>> inspect whether the kernel is doing that?
>>
>> You can, for example, record
>>
>>  cat /proc/meminfo | grep Huge
>>
>> for large page allocations.
>
> Those show zero a per my other post. However I got the impression Dave
> was asking about regular but larger-than-one-page allocations internal
> to the kernel, while the Huge* lines in /proc/meminfo refers to
> allocations specifically done by userland applications doing huge page
> allocation on a system with huge pages enabled - or am I confused?

He was asking about both (large page allocations and higher order allocations).

>> The "pagesperslab" column of /proc/slabinfo tells you how many pages
>> slab allocates from the page allocator.
>
> Seems to be what vmstat -m reports.

No, "vmstat -m" reports _total number_ of pages allocated. We're
interested in how many pages slab allocator whenever it needs to
allocate memory for a new slab. That's represented by the
"pagesperslab" column of /proc/slabinfo from which you can deduce the
page allocation order.

Pekka
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/