Re: [BUG REPORT] missing memory counter introduced by xfs

Dave Chinner <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.file-systems.xfs.general
Message-ID <20160907212206.GP30056@dastard>
On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 06:36:19PM +0800, Lin Feng wrote:
> Hi all nice xfs folks,
> 
> I'm a rookie and really fresh new in xfs and currently I ran into an
> issue same as the following link described:
> http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2014-04/msg00058.html
> 
> In my box(running cephfs osd using xfs kernel 2.6.32-358) and I sum
> all possible memory counter can be find but it seems that nearlly
> 26GB memory has gone and they are back after I echo 2 >
> /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches, so seems these memory can be reclaimed by
> slab.

It isn't "reclaimed by slab". The XFS metadata buffer cache is
reclaimed by a memory shrinker, which are for reclaiming objects
from caches that aren't the page cache. "echo 2 >
/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" runs the memory shrinkers rather than page
cache reclaim. Many slab caches are backed by memory shrinkers,
which is why it is thought that "2" is "slab reclaim"....

> And according to what David said replying in the list:
..
> That's where your memory is - in metadata buffers. The xfs_buf slab
> entries are just the handles - the metadata pages in the buffers
> usually take much more space and it's not accounted to the slab
> cache nor the page cache.

That's exactly the case.

>  Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.02K / 0.33K / 4096.00K
> 
>   OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
> 4383036 4383014  99%    1.00K 1095759        4   4383036K xfs_inode
> 5394610 5394544  99%    0.38K 539461       10   2157844K xfs_buf

So, you have *5.4 million* active metadata buffers. Each buffer will
hold  1 or 2 4k pages on your kernel, so simple math says 4M * 4k +
1.4M * 8k = 26G. There's no missing counter here....

Obviously your workload is doing something extremely metadata
intensive to have a cache footprint like this - you have more cached
buffers than inodes, dentries, etc. That in itself is very unusual -
can you describe what is stored on that filesystem and how large the
attributes being stored in each inode are?

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
[email protected]

_______________________________________________
xfs mailing list
[email protected]
http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.