- Community Home
- >
- Servers and Operating Systems
- >
- Operating Systems
- >
- Operating System - OpenVMS
- >
- Pagefile sizes
Categories
Company
Local Language
Forums
Discussions
Forums
- Data Protection and Retention
- Entry Storage Systems
- Legacy
- Midrange and Enterprise Storage
- Storage Networking
- HPE Nimble Storage
Discussions
Forums
Discussions
Discussions
Discussions
Forums
Discussions
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
- BladeSystem Infrastructure and Application Solutions
- Appliance Servers
- Alpha Servers
- BackOffice Products
- Internet Products
- HPE 9000 and HPE e3000 Servers
- Networking
- Netservers
- Secure OS Software for Linux
- Server Management (Insight Manager 7)
- Windows Server 2003
- Operating System - Tru64 Unix
- ProLiant Deployment and Provisioning
- Linux-Based Community / Regional
- Microsoft System Center Integration
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Discussion Boards
Community
Resources
Forums
Blogs
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark Topic as New
- Mark Topic as Read
- Float this Topic for Current User
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Printer Friendly Page
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 03:35 PM
05-17-2005 03:35 PM
Not such a big issue anymore from a system disk space but I'm just interested. OpenVMS Systems Managers Guide Volume 2 has a good chapter re: pagefile space but not wether it's better to keep them all an even size or not.
Solved! Go to Solution.
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 04:49 PM
05-17-2005 04:49 PM
SolutionI don't think page file sizes are much of a concern any more. The old rules of thumb of balanced size and keeping them 50% free just aren't relevant in today's environments.
As long as you've got a few 100K blocks free across all your installed files, there shouldn't be any problems. As of V7.3, the number of pagefiles supported has increased substantially and the algorithms for balancing loads have improved significantly.
With the real cost of disk space today, there's no financial excuse for any system to ever fail for lack of a few dollars worth of page file space (on the other hand, many systems I see have plenty of page file space, but literally NEVER use it!)
Personally I tend to create small to moderate sized page and swap files on the system disk, but for normal production use RENAME them to to "SPARE_PAGEFILE.SYS" or something that will prevent them from being installed by default during booting. The "real" page and swap file(s) is/are on an/other disk(s) entirely.
This means you won't have paging I/O interfering with system disk I/O, but the files are there to be used after a RENAME for upgrades. If you ever get tight on pagefile space, you can MCR SYSGEN INSTALL them very quickly, or they can be deleted to recover space immediately if you get into a system disk space crisis.
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 07:25 PM
05-17-2005 07:25 PM
Re: Pagefile sizes
We had this problem on a node with 512 MB. We solved it by creating 1 big pagefile of 4GB.
Wim
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 07:38 PM
05-17-2005 07:38 PM
Re: Pagefile sizes
It is my understanding that a process may have
pages spread across up to 4 pagefiles.
Dave
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 07:58 PM
05-17-2005 07:58 PM
Re: Pagefile sizes
I tend to agree much with John:
(on the other hand, many systems I see have plenty of page file space, but literally NEVER use it!)
mostly because I think his argument about disk prices is also valid for internal memory. And if you really ARE using the pagefile for paging, the difference in time required to access pagefile pages vs. memory pages would soon lead to allocation of the required budget!
Wim:
So, if you have processes that slowly allocate lots of memory,
... and never accesses pagefile pages again, I presume?
Would that not be a clear sign of a process that keeps doing memory allocations without deallocs?
I am really hard pressed to find a situation where that is truely needed. Usually I would consider this a case of bad programming, some kind of memory leak.
Then again, it probably is without your control, some third party package? Maybe even ported from (?).
fwie,
Proost.
Have one on me.
jpe
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 08:22 PM
05-17-2005 08:22 PM
Re: Pagefile sizes
As it turns out the application was bouncing off max virtual address space (2+ million blocks or something of that nature) and will have to be recoded or we'll live with that as a max!
Johns answer was more than sufficient for my needs.
Thanks,
Malcolm
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 08:46 PM
05-17-2005 08:46 PM
Re: Pagefile sizes
In the mean time I guess you have to redesign.
Purely Personal Opinion
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-17-2005 09:02 PM
05-17-2005 09:02 PM
Re: Pagefile sizes
David,
Pagefile allocation is done per RSRVPAGCNT pages (default 128). So, if you do a malloc of 1 page, a reservation of 128 pages is done (but you get only 1). But if all the memory in that pagefile is consumed before you can do a seconds malloc, then the malloc will fail because the reserved memory isn't available.
The 4 pagesfiles is true but is only working if there is no memory competition.
Didn't test it on 7+ but on 6.2 it was like this.
Wim
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-18-2005 10:25 AM
05-18-2005 10:25 AM
Re: Pagefile sizes
(Dave Sneddon)
> It is my understanding that a
>process may have pages spread
>across up to 4 pagefiles.
(Wim)
>Note that a processes will stay
>within the pagefile in which it started
As of V7.3, neither of these statements are true. Also the maximum size of an individual page file has been increased. SYSGEN parameters PAGFILCNT and SWPFILCNT are obsolete.
A system may have up to 254 page & swap files and any individual process can use ANY OR ALL pagefiles! Including page files installed after process creation. Page files are load balanced according to free space.
You can also DEINSTALL a page file which will stop further use. Eventually it can be expected that processes will migrate to active pagefiles (but at the moment OpenVMS doesn't actively chase processes out).
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
05-19-2005 12:46 PM
05-19-2005 12:46 PM