Large data areas - how much can you malloc

One of the funny (in a tear-your-hair fashion) things with AIX is that it has so many process models, and no matter what they will give you trouble somehow.

One common issue for us is that we hit the default limit of 256 Mbyte data per process. And of course, our applications usually don't signal that they run out of memory, instead we get weird segmentation faults and other freaky stuff.

And of course, these issues do not surface often enough for this to be the first thing we think about. But everytime it does it makes me want to set MAXDATA for everything (which I of course won't do).

What makes software great

I intended to whine about OS X and bundles, but as one of our mail servers dumped earlier today, I'll write about that instead.

One of the softwares we put a great deal in is IBM SAN FS. As is it a proprietary, closed product, I don't have a clue as to the code quality, or the development model. Or lots of other things that influence the quality of the overall product.

What I do know is that the support team is truly excellent, which compensates for the closedness of the product, something very rare in my book.

We've had (and continue to have) some issues, but no matter what cluster file system we'd chosen, I'm rather convinced we'd be a sort of test lab, and while I'd personally prefer at least being able to find and fix errors ourselves, paying someone who knows the code base to fix errors is a much smarter thing to do when trying ourselves (and this is the same for open and closed products of this magnitude).

TSM

I really do like TSM as a backup system. But the code really seems to be something to scare little kids with. I remember the first time I tried running it on a freshly installed Debian sarge. I got it working eventually, but it took rather long.

Of course, TSM is the only PPC-program I've used so far that just doesn't work on an Mac mini (intel):


pontus:~ pontus$ sudo dsmc incr
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Command Line Backup/Archive Client Interface
Client Version 5, Release 3, Level 3.0
Client date/time: 2006-05-02 14:10:13
(c) Copyright by IBM Corporation and other(s) 1990, 2006. All Rights Reserved.

Node Name: PONTUSMINI
Session established with server TSM2: AIX-RS/6000
Server Version 5, Release 3, Level 2.2
Server date/time: 2006-05-02 14:10:11 Last access: 2006-05-02 14:10:08

Incremental backup of volume '/'
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Abort trap
pontus:~ pontus$