VFS nr_files accounting
[Posted March 7, 2006 by corbet]
| From: |
| "David S. Miller" <davem-AT-davemloft.net> |
| To: |
| linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org |
| Subject: |
| VFS nr_files accounting |
| Date: |
| Sat, 04 Mar 2006 02:25:46 -0800 (PST) |
| Cc: |
| dipankar-AT-in.ibm.com, torvalds-AT-osdl.org, fabbione-AT-ubuntu.com |
| Archive-link: |
| Article,
Thread
|
I just wanted to report that I am hitting the "VFS: file-max limit xxx
reached" problem quite easily on my 32-cpu Niagara machine with 16GB
of ram with current 2.6.x GIT.
It seems far too easy to get a box into this state due to SLAB
fragmentation and RCU. And once you get a machine into this state it
is totally unusable.
Our test case is usually a "make -j8192" kernel build along with a
parallel bootstrap of gcc. That puts about 256 processes on each
cpu's runqueue, I doubt ksoftirqd can run much at all.
I think part of what helps trigger it might be ccache, which we are
using on this machine. ccache seems to open up a ton of files each
build invocation.
Usually within an hour of that load you'll hit the nr_files limit and
you can't run anything and have to power-cycle.
I think we need to think seriously about this problem.
(
Log in to post comments)