Description of problem:

This is a general question. I have several support cases recently where a glusterfs process on a client used a very high percentage of the system memory. My understanding is these instances fall into two groups, memory leaks, and events that cause legitimate high memory usage. 

My question is about the second group, events, such as blocked IO or an application that sucks up resources, that cause high memory usage. When these events complete or terminate, the glusterfs process still retains the memory. 

Is that memory locked away by the glusterfs process, or can the kernel reap the memory and allocate it to other processes? 


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

RHGS 3.4 release 0


How reproducible:


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Additional info:

If I can tell a customer that the memory apparently assigned to the glusterfs process can be recovered and used by other processes, that would alleviate a lot of anxiety on the part of that customer.