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Date:      Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:42:12 -0700
From:      Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com>
To:        Andriy Gapon <avg@icyb.net.ua>
Cc:        freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Fwd: Tomcat6 port keeps locking up??
Message-ID:  <20100917094212.GA49319@icarus.home.lan>
In-Reply-To: <4C933284.6050601@icyb.net.ua>
References:  <4C926418.2050407@gmail.com> <4C9328B9.4010100@gmail.com> <20100917085621.GA48570@icarus.home.lan> <4C933284.6050601@icyb.net.ua>

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On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 12:19:00PM +0300, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 17/09/2010 11:56 Jeremy Chadwick said the following:
> > I don't think you understand how Solaris's VM behaves with ZFS.  It
> > behaves very differently than FreeBSD.  On Solaris/OpenSolaris with ZFS,
> > you'll see the ARC taking up as much memory as possible -- but unlike
> > FreeBSD (AFAIK), when a userland or kernel application requires more
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > memory, the Solaris kernel dynamically releases portions of the ARC.
> 
> Can you please explain that "unlike" part?

When ZFS was first introduced to FreeBSD, I was given the impression
from continual posts on the mailing lists that memory which was
allocated to the ARC was never released in the situation that a userland
program wanted memory.

An example scenario.  These numbers are in no way accurate given many
other things (network mbufs, UFS and VFS cache, etc.):

- amd64 system has 2GB physical RAM (assume ~1920MB usable)
- vm.kmem_size="1536M" + vfs.zfs.arc_max="1400M"
- Heavy ZFS I/O results in ARC maxing out at ~1400MB
- Userland application runs, requests malloc() of 1024MB
- Userland gets 384MB from physical RAM, remaining 640MB from swap
- ARC remains at 1400MB

Is this no longer the case?

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc@parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |




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