SLAB is a cache mechanism used by the Kernel to avoid fragmentation.
Each internal structure (process, file descriptor, inode...) is stored within a SLAB.
The 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.
This 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.