It uses one page-per-slab for dentries and two for inodes. But there was
certainly no dentry or inode-based load --- the machine runs without X
with minimum daemons, there is no major background work. There was just a
process reading 128-kbyte blocks from a raw device and caching them in its
userspace that triggered this. Can it be that kernel uses high-order
allocations for reading from a buffer cache?
It happens rarely, I don't know if I catch it at the right time. The
report I sent, was what I found in a scrollback of vmstat. I didn't catch
it in real time.
Mikulas
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