Bug 58681
Summary: | Apparent memory leak with athlon architecture when copying large files/directories. | ||
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Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | Michael J. Ayers <michaeljayers> |
Component: | kernel | Assignee: | Arjan van de Ven <arjanv> |
Status: | CLOSED ERRATA | QA Contact: | Brian Brock <bbrock> |
Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
Priority: | high | ||
Version: | 7.2 | CC: | alan, michaeljayers |
Target Milestone: | --- | ||
Target Release: | --- | ||
Hardware: | athlon | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Whiteboard: | |||
Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
Last Closed: | 2003-06-09 17:58:50 UTC | Type: | --- |
Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
Embargoed: |
Description
Michael J. Ayers
2002-01-22 22:22:13 UTC
This is called "disk cache". If you need the data again it's already in memory and doesn't have to come from disk -> lots faster. If something actually needs the memory it's released immediatly. Understood. But it causes the system to hang after a period of time without releasing the memory back. The memory NEVER gets released back....even after a period of hours. It should be. You can easily test his with the following: dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testfile bs=1M count=1024 ; rm /tmp/testfile which basically asks for memory and then gives it back. This should basically free the cache by being nasty to the system... That does force it to give back most of the memory that it took up, but there is still some left resident. And if it is using disk-cache, is there not some sort of timeout before it releases the memory completely back to the system. Because the memory does get release back only when other processes request it. But it still always stays completely full (barring me forcing the machine into memory submission) until the system slows then locks up. If there isn't some sort of timeout or clearing method (somewhat like a garbage collector)....that seems really inefficient to me. Later 2.4.x errata are better about giving back memory efficiently when they should. |