slabinfo.plugin
SLAB is a cache mechanism used by the Kernel to avoid fragmentation.
Each internal structure (process, file descriptor, inode...) is stored within a SLAB.
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configuring Netdata for slabinfoThe plugin is disabled by default because it collects and displays a huge amount of metrics.
To enable it set slabinfo = yes
in the plugins
section of the netdata.conf
configuration file.
There is currently no configuration needed for the plugin itself.
As /proc/slabinfo
is only readable by root, this plugin is setuid root.
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For what useThis slabinfo details allows to have clues on actions done on your system.
In the following screenshot, you can clearly see a find
done on a ext4 filesystem (the number of ext4_inode_cache
& dentry
are rising fast), and a few seconds later, an admin issued a echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_cached
as their count dropped.