On 1/3/07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
quoted text
> > Checking `top` and `ps` revealed that there were no git-svnimport
> > processes doing anything, but all of my 4G of RAM was still marked as
> > used by the kernel. I had to do sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 to get it
> > to free all the RAM that the svn import had used up.
>
> I think that was just all cached, and all ok. The reason you didn't see
> any git-svnimport was that it had died off already, and all your memory
> was just caches. You could just have left it alone, and the kernel would
> have started re-using the memory for other things even without any
> "drop_caches".
>
> But what you did there didn't make anything worse, it was just likely had
> no real impact.

Thought it was worth mentioning this:

When I checked top, the numbers it showed me were:
Mem:   4059332k total,  3216480k used,   842852k free,    40824k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    37364k cached

40MB in buffers, 37MB in cache, and 3GB used.

Seems like *something* was definitely lost there. The 'used' number
didn't go down at all when I started doing other things; it went up as
the new programs started, then they used up some RAM, and then when
they exited they'd free whatever resources they'd used. However, until
I did the drop_caches, that number stayed pretty damn big.

The system has been up since then, doing lots of things, and still
seems pretty stable, so I think it's okay, but I thought that it was
worth mentioning that something seemed to be leaky.
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