Comment 161 for bug 620074

Ah !!

I think that could be the problem. The dd test with a large file (20GB) on my machine with 16GB. Looking at top while it's done shows me that the available memory steadily shrinks, all being incrementally reserved for cache.

It actually shrinks down to 80kB. Starting from that point, I experience lags when I type "ls". So.. I think this could be the problem. Is there any reason why the memory used for cache is allowed to grow out of proportion like this ?

Mathieu

(In reply to comment #146)
> <stupidmetoopost />
> Now at least i know what's going on.. it seems like its somehow coupled with
> mm
> because when this happens a) i can see invocations of the oom_killer in the
> logs after reboot and b) SYSRQ + sync & unmount action do not end the furious
> HDD LED flashing so i presume the kernel is misusing swapspace..
> btw this is a very indeterminate and simply doing the same thing again will
> not
> reproduce the problem... so my vote is for uuhm race condition or spinlock
> recursion, too.
>