Re: [PATCH v6 0/7] fs/dcache: Track & limit # of negative dentries

[Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>]

On 07/12/2018 12:04 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-07-12 at 11:54 -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
>>
>> It is not that dentry cache is harder to get rid of than the other
>> memory. It is that the ability of generate unlimited number of
>> negative dentries that will displace other useful memory from the
>> system. What the patch is trying to do is to have a warning or
>> notification system in place to spot unusual activities in regard to
>> the number of negative dentries in the system. The system
>> administrators can then decide on what to do next.
> But every cache has this property: I can cause the same effect by doing
> a streaming read on a multi gigabyte file: the page cache will fill
> with the clean pages belonging to the file until I run out of memory
> and it has to start evicting older cache entries.  Once we hit the
> steady state of minimal free memory, the mm subsytem tries to balance
> the cache requests (like my streaming read) against the existing pool
> of cached objects.
>
> The question I'm trying to get an answer to is why does the dentry
> cache need special limits when the mm handling of the page cache (and
> other mm caches) just works?
>
> James
>

I/O activities can be easily tracked. Generation of negative dentries,
however, is more insidious. So the ability to track and be notified when
too many negative dentries are created can be a useful tool for the
system administrators. Besides, there are paranoid users out there who
want to have control of as much as system parameters as possible.

Cheers,
Longman