fbackup out of virtual memory

[Luc Monnens]

fbackup (run from root's crontab and configured in sam) all of a sudden fails whith "(1505) out of virtual memory" message.

[T G Manikandan]

YOu should check two things here

1.Amount of swap on the system.
You need to increase the swap.

2.check the kernel parameter maxdsiz.

make sure that maxdsiz is increased to around 200-250MB

Thanks

[Steve Steel]

Hi


need to tune your box

Increase maxdsiz and possibly add swap


swapinfo -at will tell you how that is doing.

Steve Steel

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

need to increase the swap space

[Luc Monnens]

I already added additional swap space (in fact I added a second device swap), although I did not see any problem in the swapinfo output (I attached a typical one).

I did not touch maxdsiz (so that is still at the default 64Mb) yet, but will do that now.
Does anybody know what the formula for 200Mb should be?

I guess I can leave maxdsiz_64bit as is (at the default 1Gb)?
Is that because fbackup is a 32-bit application?

Does anybody have any idea why this started?
Is it possibly linked to a growing filesystem that fbackup has to write to tape

[T G Manikandan · Accepted solution]

The value for 200MB would be
0X00BEBC200

Also
maxdsiz is the data size for a process.
Probably the fbackup process has crossed the default 64 MB value.

[Darren Prior]

Hi,

In answer to the "why did this start" question, it is most likely due to backing up larger numbers of files. You are probably finding that fbackup is failing before it attempts to write to the tape. At this point it is building a list of the files to backup which contains the full pathname for each file plus some other internal data.

If you're backing up 300,000 files, with an average pathname length of 100 chars, that's 30Mb just for the pathnames (ie ignoring the other internal data stored.) Considering you have maxdsiz set to 64Mb per process it's likely that you will have used it up before the index generation is completed.

regards,

Darren

[Luc Monnens]

In my case it was not swap, but just the kernel param maxdsiz.
When I changed that from the default 64Mb to 200Mb, my backups went fine again.
Darren's mail explains perfectly the why and TG correctly gave me what to fill in to get 200Mb.
Thanx for all the answers.

[Sanjiv Sharma_1]

Hi,

I have a similar problem.
What is the value of the 250 MB for maxdsiz?

Thanks,

[Luc Monnens]

Sorry, forgot to close.