Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 13:01:19 -0700 From: John Merryweather Cooper <jmcoopr@webmail.bmi.net> To: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> Cc: FreeBSD-STABLE Mailing List <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Should /sys/i386/conf/GENERIC's SysV shared memory settings defaults be re-thought? Message-ID: <3AF1B90F.30DA4861@webmail.bmi.net> References: <200105031913.f43JDjw72049@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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David Wolfskill wrote: > > >Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 12:01:40 -0700 > >From: John Merryweather Cooper <jmcoopr@webmail.bmi.net> > > >After finally getting Amanda up and running on my system, I noticed that > >my cron jobs for amdump would crash with an error in SHMGET if X was > >running when the amdump job was scheduled. I have also been plagued by > >IMLIB SHM memory allocation errors. I have just discovered that, by > >increasing the defaults for all the SysV settings listed in LINT, I have > >been able to make all those errors disappear; and Amanda will now run to > >completion even with X running. I increased all these settings by about > >a factor of x8--remembering that in OS/2 half of all physical memory was > >made available for shared memory operations--giving me 32 megs of shared > >memory. > > Hmmm.... > > >... > > >Thoughts? > > I find this somewhat surprising, since I've been backing up not only the > servers here, but also the important desktops (the ones running FreeBSD) > on engineers' desks here for around 2.5 years using amanda. And the > engineers generally run X... but I've never encountered that problem. > (Before the shared memory stuff was included in GENERIC, I included it > manually in the kernels when I set up their machines. I just left the > default settings alone.) > Even with just GNOME+Enlightenment running, stderr is full of IMLIB error messages unless I alter the SysV parameters. Xsreensaver also triggers what look like shared memory errors with some of the modules. Netscape (a known memory-hog in any configuration) also generates these errors. They generally aren't fatal (everything seems to work o.k.), but I'm glad they're gone now . . . > I suppose it may depend on the particular X workload; for example, I use > tvtwm as a window manager, while I understand that some folks prefer the > appearance or behavior of a window manager that is a bit more resource- > intensive. I'm using GNOME+Enlightenment with a smattering of KDE tools (I like KNode) . . . > I do tend to kick "maxusers" up a bit; I have it set to 128 on my > laptop. I haven't checked to see if that affects such things as shared > memory availability.... (I also tend to be fairly generous with swap > space: I prefer to avoid swapping, but if the system really needs to > swap, I much prefer letting it do so to preventing that.) Yes, I've also punched up MAXUSERS to 128, but that didn't fix things . . . so then I tried the SysV settings, they worked . . . . YMMV. jmc > Cheers, > david > -- > David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator > Desk: 650/577-7158 TIE: 8/499-7158 Cell: 650/759-0823 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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