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

[Sandro Tosi]

Hi Frank,
I just made some tests

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 16:36, Frank S. Thomas <fst at debian.org> wrote:
> So if I'm right, the client should never leave applications in memory which is
> opposed to the other bug you reported. *sigh* :-)

well, it shows of they are related (see below)

> 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.

Before the tests I got:

$ 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>

$ ~/tmp/boinc-mem-usage.sh
Host's total memory:  4058168 KiB  3963.05 MiB
Host's total swap:          0 KiB  0.00 MiB

BOINC's total resident set size:    1231356 KiB  1202.50 MiB
BOINC's total virtual memory size:  1331948 KiB  1300.73 MiB

BOINC's total resident set size:   30.3%
BOINC's total virtual memory size: 32.8%

Then I set:

$ egrep "ram_max_used_idle_pct|ram_max_used_busy_pct"
/etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml
   <ram_max_used_busy_pct>25.000000</ram_max_used_busy_pct>
   <ram_max_used_idle_pct>50.000000</ram_max_used_idle_pct>

guess what?

$ ~/tmp/boinc-mem-usage.sh
Host's total memory:  4058168 KiB  3963.05 MiB
Host's total swap:          0 KiB  0.00 MiB

BOINC's total resident set size:    1629944 KiB  1591.74 MiB
BOINC's total virtual memory size:  1782020 KiB  1740.25 MiB

BOINC's total resident set size:   40.2%
BOINC's total virtual memory size: 43.9%

The problem is that the process put on hold due to "Waiting for
memory" are indeed *left in memory* so my machine went trashing (I got
to kill boinc from a laptop).

If you need some other tests, simply ask (I'd like to see boinc bug free :) ).

Cheers,
Sandro

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