Bug#491226: boincmgr: does not respect VM occupation limits

[Sandro Tosi]

Hi Frank,

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 19:53, Frank S. Thomas <fst at debian.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 17 July 2008 20:58, Sandro Tosi wrote:
>> I've set limits for VM usage:
>>
>> zion:/debs# grep vm_max_used_pct etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml
>>    <vm_max_used_pct>75.000000</vm_max_used_pct>
>
> I'm not totally sure but I think <vm_max_used_pct> is only used to determine
> if enough swap space is available to leave suspended applications in memory
> if <leave_apps_in_memory> is set. So for example if <vm_max_used_pct> is set
> to 25.0 and you have 1 GB of swap space, BOINC would only use 250 MB of it
> for suspended applications.

Well, on this machine there is no swap space ;)

>> but boicmgr didn't respect them, and I got 4 garli processes (each one
>> takes 1Gb of ram) on my 4Gb Ram machine, and the box got freezed.
>
> If you want to limit RAM usage, you should adjust <ram_max_used_busy_pct> and
> <ram_max_used_idle_pct> in global_prefs_override.xml.

These are the values for the keys:

$ egrep "ram_max_used_idle_pct|ram_max_used_busy_pct"
/etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml
   <ram_max_used_busy_pct>50.000000</ram_max_used_busy_pct>
   <ram_max_used_idle_pct>90.000000</ram_max_used_idle_pct>

It seems a safe situation, but the problem appears anyhow (and I
didn't change those parameters in the meantime). I was on 6.2.12 while
now I'm on 6.2.14 (waiting for .18 to be built for amd64) so I don't
know if in the meantime it was fixed or not.

Cheers,
-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, Morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi