[clug] Out of Memory with large page cache

[Ian Munsie]

I think I may have found a possible answer to my own question - I
realised after sending that message that I have some of my filesystem
(including /var/log) mounted as tmpfs.

My understanding of tmpfs and ramfs is that they sit on top of VFS and
tell it that none of their blocks should be automatically freed, so I
suppose they would therefore be reported as page cache by free, atop
and similar utilities.

Perhaps /var/log got excessively large and was the cause of the
unfreeable cache. I wish I hadn't rebooted and could check it, but
doing a quick test dumping a large file in /var/log and watching the
page cache size would seem to validate this theory.

Cheers,
-Ian

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