vm.pmap.shpgperproc syslog messages

[D Hill]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 at 23:15 -0000, d.hill at yournetplus.com confabulated:

> I just noticed today I'm starting to get messages in ../messages stating:

Sorry. It was actually in the dmesg report I saw the messages.

>  Approaching the limit on PV entries, consider increasing either the
>  vm.pmap.shpgperproc or the vm.pmap.pv_entry_max sysctl.
>
> I did some searching and don't really know what is going on. I did a search 
> using sysctl for all pmap knobs and this is what they are currently:
>
>  vm.pmap.pmap_collect_active: 0
>  vm.pmap.pmap_collect_inactive: 0
>  vm.pmap.pv_entry_spare: 51310
>  vm.pmap.pv_entry_allocs: 67575721858
>  vm.pmap.pv_entry_frees: 67574088800
>  vm.pmap.pc_chunk_tryfail: 0
>  vm.pmap.pc_chunk_frees: 416252902
>  vm.pmap.pc_chunk_allocs: 416262928
>  vm.pmap.pc_chunk_count: 10026
>  vm.pmap.pv_entry_count: 1633059
>  vm.pmap.shpgperproc: 500
>  vm.pmap.pv_entry_max: 6125408
>
> I did increased vm.pmap.shpgperproc to 500 from 200 and immediately saw 
> vm.pmap.pv_entry_max increase as well.
>
> This server is a Dell PowerEdge 6850 with four 3.0Gz dual core Zeon 
> processors and 12Gb ram. The server's only purpose is a spam filter. It is 
> running SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Postfix and MySQL. The server is pretty memory 
> intensive. Active memory usually doesn't drop below 8Gb. SpamAssassin usually 
> has roughly 24 children running all the time consuming ~120Mb per child. 
> MySQL is currently taking ~5.5Gb.
>
> Can someone shed light on what is going on or what needs to be tweaked?