[OpenAFS-devel] Re: afsd crashes SLES11 SP1 system

[Felix Frank]

On 10/03/2010 05:56 PM, Harald Barth wrote:
>
>> I digged into the /var/log/messages and found something:
>> Based on this I changed the client settings for the memcache. I went from
>> "AUTOMATIC" to "65536" (64MB) and that worked. Going up to 96MB worked,
>> 128MB crashed the machine again. Tried 97MB and it crashed as well. 96MB
>> seems to be the limit.
>
> There is a limit how much kernel memory you can allocate (that is what
> memcache does) on 32bit Linux. That number is _much_ bigger on 64bit
> Linux.
>
> I think it should refuse to start instead of crashing. Another route to take
> would be "disc cache" in tmpfs, but I don't know if that works nowadays.

It does. I remember trying that around 1.4.11, but never in a 32bit 
environment (I don't see why that would be a problem, though).

Note that if the motivation for memcache is faster bulk transfers (which 
you gain), disk cache in a ramdisk won't give you the same throughput.

But I agree, this approach could conceivably be much more stable in some 
environments.

Regards,
Felix