[Lugstuff] shared memory kernel

[Theodore Knab]

Hi I was wondering if anyone knows how to tune the three shared memory parameters
found in the /etc/sysctl.conf.  For those of you not familiar with
sysctl, it holds tunable kernel configurations. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysctl

Normally, you have to increase the default settings for shared
memory use when messing with database applications and other applications that lock a lot
of memory.

The three I am focusing on are:
kernel.shmax
kernel.shmall
kernel.shmni

More specifically, I am wondering what happens if the tuning numbers for
shmax are set too high ? Does the kernel think it has more RAM that it
does ? The reverse seems to be true. For example, if the shared memory
number is too low applications requiring more shared memory will crash
or just not start.

For example, my home system runs Zone Minder for keeping track of
camera data. The default settings for shmax of 32Mb had to be 
increased for this application to work.

In contrast, I found a Informix machine that was tuned with a
shmmax that I thing was outrageously high.

For example, I found a system with 24GB had this parameter:
kernel.shmmax = 4398046511104 

According to the Google calculation this number translates to:
4 398 046 511 104 bytes = 4096 gigabytes

This is the default setting that IBM Informix has on their website for
their Database application. So, I can understand how this may have been 
set. However, it seems not many people would have 4096GB or more on their machine.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v115/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.relnotes.doc/ids_1150xc5/mach/ids_machine_notes_11.50.linppc64.html

I have since reset the setting to 75% of the total RAM in bytes, but I am still
wondering what happens to a Linux system. The machine in question locked
up twice due to all the memory being used. This is not something that
created a log entry. Also, the machine seemed to become unstable when it started swapping. 
It was just as if all the applications on the machine were trying to consuming more RAM 
that the system had.  For example, recently while running a database upgrade script on the
machine, I could not run simple shell commands. When I tried to log in,
I could type a few characters but only after a few minutes of waiting.
I tried to type 'ctrl-alt-del' but it appeared the program the shutdown
program could not be run in the time I had available to wait.  
It was not a hard crash where errors appear. 

Could this be a possible symptom of the kernel.shmmax being too high ?

Here are the current setting I am using for the 24GB machine.
kernel.shmmax = 18956485632 
kernel.shmall = 4194304 
kernel.shmmni = 4096

I used this script to calculate the max shared memory:
#!/bin/sh
#limits the kernel's shared memory to 1/2 actually physical memory
mem_bytes=`awk '/MemTotal:/ { printf "%0.f",$2 * 1024}' /proc/meminfo`
mem_max=`expr $mem_bytes / 2` #devide by 2
mem_max=`expr $mem_bytes / 4` #devide by 3

echo "mem max is $mem_max"

mem_max=`expr $mem_max + $mem_max + $mem_max` #gets a 75%
page_size=`getconf PAGE_SIZE`
shmall=`expr $mem_bytes / $page_size`
echo \# Maximum shared segment size in bytes
echo kernel.shmmax = $mem_max
echo \# Maximum number of shared memory segments in pages
echo kernel.shmall = $shmall


-- 
Ted Knab