Norbert Cartagena wrote:
>
> Ed Centanni wrote:
> >
> > When I take a look at /proc/meminfo (kernel version 2.4.0 (4GB RAM
> > enabled) I find that almost a third of my RAM is classified as
> > "Inact_dirty". Does anyone have a good explanation of what this means.
> > The kernel source code "fs/proc/proc_misc.c" gets this value from
> > K(nr_inactive_dirty_pages).
> >
> > Please -- no porn site jokes.
> >
> > TIA
> > Ed.
>
> This might not be of much, but have you checked out O'Reilly's Book on
> the Linux Kernel (I believe it's called "Linux Kernel Internals")? That
> might have some info. If you can't get to it soon I'll see if I can find
> out something for you netx time I make my usual Barness and Noble
> Hermitage ;)
>
Thanks. After posting the question I dug deeper into my vast
underground caverns of links and I did find some information here:
http://umeet.uninet.edu/conferencias/27-11-2000/2711.html
and here:
http://www.surriel.com/lectures/mmtour.html
That pretty much answers my question. If anyone's interested I'll
share.
> P.S.
> Can you post your /proc/meminfo file? I'd like to compare some notes
> I've been looking at.
>
Here it is:
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 327245824 317763584 9482240 0 51363840 67473408
Swap: 139821056 1118208 138702848
MemTotal: 319576 kB
MemFree: 9260 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 50160 kB
Cached: 65892 kB
Active: 29384 kB
Inact_dirty: 83756 kB
Inact_clean: 2912 kB
Inact_target: 76 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 319576 kB
LowFree: 9260 kB
SwapTotal: 136544 kB
SwapFree: 135452 kB
The Inact_dirty was higher before I did a few experiments and reduced
it. The experiments confirmed the information I got from the links.
What's interesting is that large numbers in this class of memory
shouldn't show up on systems where RAM is low enough to causing
swapping. Only systems with "RAM to burn" will have significant numbers
in this class. One could consider it a symption of "too much RAM". It
also shows up a bug in xosview that shows more memory being used as
"user or share" under such conditions than is true.
The way this all started is that I upgraded the RAM on my system from 64
Meg to 320. After being up 24 hours or so xosview reported that most of
my memory (2/3) was being used by "user/share" programs and libraries
and didn't change after I logged off and back on to release all loaded
programs and shared libraries I use. Some kind of unknown executable
appeared to be hogging almost 100Meg of RAM. Fearing a crack I started
to investigate memory usage and thus this journey. It's really just
memory that used to be occupied by executables but hasn't yet been
reclaimed for re-use. The kernel delays reclaimation until the memory
is needed again.
All's well except for misleading and simplistic info from xosview.
Ed.
> P.P.S.
> Long shot, but here goes (this is why I left it for last):
> Do you have this message during bootup?
>
> "Kernel command line: keepinitrd"
>
No.
<snip>
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