From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jan 5 14:44:15 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 98CE616A46C; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 14:44:15 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from vadim_nuclight@mail.ru) Received: from mx6.mail.ru (mx6.mail.ru [194.67.23.26]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6BBEE13C4D9; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 14:44:15 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from vadim_nuclight@mail.ru) Received: from [78.140.2.250] (port=11767 helo=nuclight.avtf.net) by mx6.mail.ru with esmtp id 1JBAFx-000Fiv-00; Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:44:13 +0300 Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:44:10 +0600 To: "Peter Jeremy" References: <20080104192820.GM947@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> <20080105011027.GA21334@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> From: "Vadim Goncharov" Organization: AVTF TPU Hostel Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; delsp=yes; charset=koi8-r MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20080105011027.GA21334@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> User-Agent: Opera M2/7.54 (Win32, build 3865) Cc: "freebsd-current@freebsd.org" , "advocacy@freebsd.org" Subject: Re: sbrk(2), OOM-killer and malloc() overcommit X-BeenThere: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Evangelism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:44:15 -0000 05.01.08 @ 07:10 Peter Jeremy wrote: >> So why we are losing users due to this "feature", > > Other than your previous post, I don't recall seeing this claim before. > Can you provide references to people stating that they are abandoning > FreeBSD because it doesn't support swap reservation? I've had a quick > look at can't find anything. Definitely, no-one considers it enough of > a problem to have raised a PR. Those people usually do not read or write any maillists, PRs, etc. - they simply take another OS, which they heard of support from commercial vendors, and which CAN do what they want, in this case - enable space reservation for at least some processes. I don't remember all of that people, but at least one lives in my town, and it is him program (with his name/address in comments) which I gave as illustration of problem in my first letter of this thread. And this man now says everyone that FreeBSD is good for education/small systems, but unsuitable for serious data-mining tasks... >> Can I find somewhere summary of that discussions in archives? > > Since you're making the claim, how about _you_ produce the evidence. I don't have too many time to search through all bikeshedding on a non-native language. But sometime ago this topic was discussed in russian NNTP BSD group, which shown in actuality of problem for some people - as a result, I was told that Kostik Belousov made a patch partially solving problem. So - why do not have tunable, which can pleasure both camps? Every time when people want XXX and others want the opposite - make it an option to not loose any of them... > In general, swap over-commit is a good idea because it enables you to > get by with far less resources than would otherwise be necessary - I've > disabled swap reservation on some systems at work to allieviate problems > that it was causing and I haven't seen any subsequent issues due to > overcommit being in use. There were case in our town when on heavy loaded web-server apache processes were dying on memory pressure - aforementioned man said that was due to overcommit and OOM killer working. I don't know about details, but surely it could lead to switching to Linux from FreeBSD... So I think, if that users are mistaking, we need an article explaininfg why memory overcommit is good and where are they wrong - we need people think good about FreeBSD, yeah? Possibly with tunable and description of it's bad effects, of course. -- WBR, Vadim Goncharov