From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514 Description of problem: When create or copy large file >= 6gb I have a memory leak ! I use a IBM e236 with 2 opteron processors and 4 gb mem + qla2340 + ibm storage fast600! I look the top command and the cp process use all the memory !! I have create swap space 4 gb but in the top command no swap space used! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.21-27.0.1.ELsmp How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.cp largefile from storage to local (mirror) disk 2. 3. Actual Results: system very low performance Additional info:
Created attachment 110181 [details] As3 info rar file Here is some information about the system settings
Dimitris, please provide more information here. Please start by running "vmstat 1" while the copy is taking place and attach the results. RHEL3 uses system memory to cache the file system data when you reference file pages so its is likely that the system is still holding onto that memory for that purpose. Larry Woodman
Created attachment 110298 [details] vmstat output
Dimitris, thanks for the vmstat output. I dont see a problem with the kernel, its working as it is designed. Before starting the copy you have ~1.5GB in the pagecache and ~1.5GB free. After the copy you have ~3GB in the pagecache and the system has not swapped at all. VMSTAT output....................... r b swpd free buff cache 1 1 0 1542952 211060 1555064 ... 0 0 0 20356 221816 3055976 .................................... The Linux kernel uses all available memory to cache filesystem data so that it wont have to do disk IO if that file data is needed again in the near future. Since it can and does reclaim those pages out of the file system cache its not leaking memory, its just using it appropriately. Do you agree or is there some other problem that I am not understanding here? Thanks, Larry Woodman