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Date:      Fri, 14 Mar 2003 16:57:18 -0800
From:      "Andrew Kinney" <andykinney@advantagecom.net>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: increasing KVA_PAGES and broken pthreads
Message-ID:  <3E7209EE.8610.39DAB11@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0303141602150.44309-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>
References:  <3E71FB25.27881.363E6F4@localhost>

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On 14 Mar 2003, at 16:08, Julian Elischer wrote:

> 
> That patch is in the RELENG_4 tree and will be included in 4.8
> 

Great!  Thanks for the info.

> 
> yes it was.. but not in RELENG_4_7 because that is for security
> patches.
> 

I'm showing my newbieness here.  :-)  Apologies.  I knew that, but 
for some reason it didn't occur to me that patches such as this 
would only occur on the development branches.

> 
> 4.7 is being left behind.. look at 4.8
> 

I guess I'll just wait for 4.8 to reach "RELEASE" level then and 
work on reducing the workload of the system in the meantime, 
though the hardware is nowhere near overloaded.  I wish I could 
track CURRENT, but I'm squeamish about that for a production 
system such as this.

> > IMHO, this issue could be a royal pain in the butt when I start
> > working on quad processor systems with 32GB of RAM (not unrealistic
> > at this company). 
>
> Well we can't USE 32GB od RAM yet.. I doubt that 4.x will ever be able
> to do that (though I could be proven wrong).
> 

Really?  I was under the impression that FreeBSD was capable of 
addressing 8TB of RAM if the hardware supports it.  Don't 
remember which FreeBSD list archive I read that in, but it's not a 
topic that seems to come up often since most hardware is limited 
to 4GB of address space.  I've got access to hardware that can 
address 32GB of RAM.  Not sure of the exact details of how it 
works (multiple external memory managers?), but it's a quad Xeon 
board by SuperMicro.

If it's a question of "is there any application that can ever use that 
much RAM", we're certainly testing the limits here. :-)  We're not 
swapping at all with 4GB, but on several occasions we've gotten 
close or swapped a few hundred KB.  Our two little 2GHz CPUs 
are humming right along, but most of the time they're better than 
60% idle.  I imagine that if we pushed the CPUs a bit harder or got 
hit with a big traffic spike, we'd probably start swapping and want to 
start thinking about a system that can handle more RAM.  

Of course, that's assuming that the OS or applications don't break 
before the hardware gets up to a decent load.  Hence, I'm hoping to 
get a lot of the large memory OS issues resolved (many are by 
tuning) so we can at least get what we paid for out of the hardware.



Sincerely,
Andrew Kinney
President and
Chief Technology Officer
Advantagecom Networks, Inc.
http://www.advantagecom.net


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