What is shrink_slab, and why is it showing up in /var/log/messages?

Posted by Steve Kehlet on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Steve Kehlet
Published on 2012-06-08T17:57:55Z Indexed on 2012/06/08 22:42 UTC
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linux

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kernel

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virtual-memory

I'm investigating some application issues on a Linux system and noticed this around the time of the most recent problem, but not close enough to be definitively related:

Jun  7 17:51:49 localhost kernel: shrink_slab: nr=-155456000
Jun  7 17:51:49 localhost kernel: shrink_slab: nr=-157859400
Jun  7 17:51:49 localhost kernel: shrink_slab: nr=-157833400
Jun  8 06:20:23 localhost kernel: shrink_slab: nr=-284172800

What is this? Googling isn't helping, I get that it's something with VM, but why is it suddenly showing up in /var/log/messages?

Edit: I take it it's showing this because the number of pages it could free ("nr") is negative. Which is presumably a bad thing. I found patches for newer kernels that display a more useful message to this effect. Still not sure what this means though, or what I need to do about it.

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