Re: Limiting Disck Cache

[Ivan Garcia Sainz-Aja <ivangsa@yahoo.es>]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 04:34:45PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 22:24 +0000, Ivan Garcia Sainz-Aja wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > how can i limit the amount of this cache linux uses?
> 
> You can't.  By design, it's totally dynamic.
> 
> > i'm using an external usb hd for playing movies/mp3 but
> > after a time of usage the memory becomes full and the system 
> > virtually unusable and i got to umount/mount the drive to 
> > keep working
> > 
> > root@thinkpad:~# cat /proc/meminfo
> >         total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
> > Mem:  775114752 772341760  2772992        0  7421952 609456128
> > Swap: 348323840 14917632 333406208
> > MemTotal:       756948 kB
> > MemFree:          2708 kB
> > MemShared:           0 kB
> > Buffers:          7248 kB
> > Cached:         593088 kB
> > SwapCached:       2084 kB
> > Active:          41492 kB
> > Inactive:       664144 kB
> > HighTotal:           0 kB
> > HighFree:            0 kB
> > LowTotal:       756948 kB
> > LowFree:          2708 kB
> > SwapTotal:      340160 kB
> > SwapFree:       325592 kB
> > 
> > which is mad
> 
> Only 15MB of "stuff" is in swap.  That's not enough to make the
> system "virtually unusable".  Something else must be going on that
> you aren't telling us about.

At the moment of that cat /proc/meminfo i was only coping an mpeg file
from the cdrom to usb hd and just surfing the web when the mouse start
responding funy so i just stoped tomcat and eclipse but the happiness
didnt last
the point is that if i have the sub drive connected the disck cache grows
up to whatever limit and everything stop working 
i even got java.lang.OutOfMemory from tomcat

Im monitoring the memory with that aplication from KDE and there is not
much swap usage and the phisical free memory under 5% while disk cache is
about 500M ...

I dont know what is this but it frozes the computer

Thanks for any help.

PS: here it goes another after a time of 'normal' working

total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  775114752 770510848  4603904        0 41541632 477081600
Swap: 348323840 13242368 335081472
MemTotal:       756948 kB
MemFree:          4496 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:         40568 kB
Cached:         461060 kB
SwapCached:       4840 kB
Active:         131572 kB
Inactive:       562132 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       756948 kB
LowFree:          4496 kB
SwapTotal:      340160 kB
SwapFree:       327228 kB