Tuneable Parameters

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Richard Burnett-Godfree" <Richard at Tribune-IS.com> writes:

> I am trying to port software currently running on hp-ux to freeBSD 4.9.
> 
> The application I have will normally run for large numbers of users
> accessing database applications.
> 
> On hp-ux to enable reasonable user numbers with large numbers of files open
> I would normally tune
> 
> MAXFILES			No files per process
> MAXFILES_LIM		System level max files per process
> MAXUPRC			Max no user processes
> MAXUSERS			Used by kernel generation to calc tables sizes
> NFILE				Max no files open
> NFLOCKS			Max no file locks
> NINODE			Max no inodes open
> NPTY				Max no of virtual telnet devices
> 
> Where do these exist in FreeBSD or do I not worry about these type of
> things.  I would normally experience 'unable to fork process' or issues with
> performance as unix files are opened and accessed dynamically on a 'least
> recently used' basis based on the size of some of these tables.

See "man tuning" but the process limits (see limit(1)) are not, by
default, restrictive.  If your box has a lot of memory (which it
sounds like it should), then leaving maxusers at the default of 0
(i.e., auto-tuning at boot time) may well be okay for you.  Of course,
that means you'd need to check the number of file handles to see if
that's sufficient (it looks like the bottleneck for this application).
Although those are affected by maxusers, they can be specified
explicitly to override what maxusers would set them to.

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org:8088/~lowell/