Huge (100k+) number of processes

Andrew Pantyukhin infofarmer at gmail.com
Wed Apr 26 15:40:58 UTC 2006


On 4/26/06, Dan Nelson <dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:
> In the last episode (Apr 26), Andrew Pantyukhin said:
> > On 4/26/06, Iantcho Vassilev <ianchov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 4/26/06, Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I was wondering if it's possible to run over 100k processes
> > > > simultaneously on a FreeBSD box with sufficient amount
> > > > of RAM (and CPU power).
> > >
> > > Sure,why not?
> >
> > The problem is that kern.maxproc=200000 line in /boot/loader.conf
> > only raised the real value to 21576. Is that authoritative, or should
> > I just try and run 200k processes? I only have 512Mb of RAM, and I
> > wonder if it's enough to run 100k+ of, say, /bin/sleep?
>
> Make sure you have enough RAM to cover those 100k processes.  There's
> code that limits maxproc to physpages/12 ("Limit maxproc so that kmap
> entries cannot be exhausted by processes").  You can try removing that
> code, but each process does require a couple of private pages.
> Assuming 5 pages, you'll need 2 GB of RAM just for that overhead,
> before you take into account any memory your application will allocate.
>
> Are you sure you need 100k separate processes running?
>
> --
>         Dan Nelson
>         dnelson at allantgroup.com
>

Hmm, I have 2Gb boxes around, but no 4 or 8Gb ones running
FreeBSD. I'm just foolishly interested in running 200k of more or less
real (but very simple) processes under FreeBSD...


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