From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Dec 7 10:22: 6 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 678D537B41A for ; Fri, 7 Dec 2001 10:22:00 -0800 (PST) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.11.6/8.11.5) with SMTP id fB7ILki45680 for ; Fri, 7 Dec 2001 13:21:46 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 13:21:46 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Default value for maxusers Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG While reviewing and updating the content of tuning(7), I noticed the following text: The kern.maxusers tunable defaults to an incredibly low value. For most modern machines, you probably want to increase this value to 64, 128, or 256. We do not recommend going above 256 unless you need a huge number of file descriptors. Network buffers are also affected but can be controlled with a separate kernel option. Do not increase maxusers just to get more network mbufs. Systems older than FreeBSD 4.4 do not have this loader tunable and require that the kernel config(8) option maxusers be set instead. The first two sentences suggest that either we need to do one of the following: (1) Update the default maxusers value in GENERIC to something larger (perhaps 64), and remove the text from tuning(7), or... (2) Remove this text from tuning(7). It seems rediculous to have a default that is known to be inadequate (or worse, "incredibly low"). I have to admit that the first thing I do with any box is either recompile the kernel to have higher maxusers, or use kern.maxusers in /boot/loader.conf to update it to at least 64. If we believe the observations above are correct, the choice seems simple: update GENERIC, and I'd be happy to commit that to at least -CURRENT, and possibly -STABLE. If they're not, we should moderate the description above a bit :-). Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message