Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there _aren't_ memory leaks; I'm sure
there are many waiting to be found. But in the case of 2.1.54, the
dcache and inode memory can grow excessively and give the symptoms of a
leak.
The ls -alR command is a good test case, as it floods the system with
many new dentries and inodes, so it takes a while for the age-sorted
reclamation to take place. I'm doing some experimentation with it now.
The patch I posted should help a lot, though it's not perfect yet.
Regards,
Bill