makedumpfile memory usage grows with system memory size

[Atsushi Kumagai]

Hello Don,

On Fri, 11 May 2012 09:26:01 -0400
Don Zickus <dzickus at redhat.com> wrote:

> > Thank you for your reply, Don, Vivek.
> > 
> > As Don said, I tried to change the method to exclude free pages and
> > planed to resolve the memory consumption issue after it, because
> > parsing free list repeatedly may cause a performance issue.
> > 
> > However, I'm thinking that to fix the size of memory consumption is more
> > important than to resolve a performance issue for large system.
> > 
> > So I'm afraid that I would like to change the plan as:
> > 
> >   1. Implement "iterating filtering processing" to fix the size of memory
> >      consumption. At this stage, makedumpfile will parse free list repeatedly
> >      even though it may cause a performance issue.
> >      
> >   2. Take care of the performance issue after the 1st step.
> 
> Hello Atsushi-san,
> 
> Hmm.  The problem with the free list is that the addresses are in random
> order, hence the reason to parse it repeatedly, correct?

Yes.

> I figured, now that you have a solution to parse the addresses in a linear
> way (the changes you made a couple of weeks ago), you would just continue
> with that.  With that complete, we can look at the performance issues and
> solve them then.
> 
> But it is up to you.  You are willing to do the work, so I will defer to
> your judgement on how best to proceed. :-)

What I wanted to tell you was I want to resolve the memory consumption issue
as soon as possible. In other words, I think the method to exclude free pages
is not so important.
I'll continue to work with the method which is easy to implement.


Thanks
Atsushi Kumagai