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

[Frank S. Thomas]

Hi Sandro,

On Monday 25 August 2008 22:40, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 19:53, Frank S. Thomas <fst at debian.org> wrote:
> > 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 ;)

So if I'm right, the client should never leave applications in memory which is 
opposed to the other bug you reported. *sigh* :-)

> > 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.

Frankly, I don't know. But it would be interesting if you could modify those 
values to find out if it affects RAM usage. For example, set them to 25.0 and 
50.0, restart the client and monitor the client's RAM usage. To monitor 
BOINC's RAM usage the attached script may be helpful:
    $ watch -n 0.5 ./boinc-mem-usage.sh

In theory, BOINC's total resident set size (in %) should never exceed 
ram_max_used_idle_pct.

Cheers,
-- 
Frank S. Thomas <fst at debian.org>           PGP public key ID: 0xDC426429
Debian Developer                            finger fst/key at db.debian.org
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