Re: Hard-limits for kern.maxproc
Re: Hard-limits for kern.maxproc
- Subject: Re: Hard-limits for kern.maxproc
- From: mm w <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:43:33 -0800
Hi Nathan, there is or was certainly a reason for this limit,
a hard limit is either more than or equal to a soft limit, as you said
the soft limit can be changed through sysctl command,
this value wasn't always defined as 2500, for instance, NPROC is
using MAXUSERS, macosx is "by default" compiled with a "Medium scale" limit
you can change it at compile time to setup a "larger scale" limit
anyway these specifications are available in the UNIX03 process structure part
Cheers!
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Nathan <email@hidden> wrote:
> I've been posting about this to macos-x-server and unix-porting for a
> few days before it dawned on me that there was probably a kernel
> mailing list. So...Hi! My name's Nathan and this is my first post.
>
> ----
>
> After a frustrating and long search for the root of the various
> problems I was having with my new Xserve serving email via IMAP, I was
> tipped off by...
>
> http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1659
>
> ...that the kernel has insanely low defaults (for a server) for
> kern.maxproc (532), which controls the maximum amount of processes
> allowed to run on the system. While trying to raise the default to a
> reasonable value (Linux defaults to 32,768 for example), I discovered
> that I couldn't raise it above 2500. Peter O'Gorman tells me off that
> this is a hard-coded limit in Xnu:
>
> ./bsd/conf/param.c:#define HNPROC 2500 /* based on thread_max */
>
> I've already filed rdar://6536876 asking that this be raised, but as
> I've had very poor returns with my filed bugs that I spent a long time
> researching, and very good returns on Apple mailing lists (go
> apple-x11!), I thought I'd post here too. :-)
>
> Is there any reason the hard limit couldn't be raised an order of
> magnitude or two? Even with raising kern.maxproc (and
> kern.maxprocperuid and the launchd settings that mirror it and
> launchd's maxfiles setting, etc. etc) my Xserve will run into the
> process limit far before it exhausts CPU, RAM, disk, or bandwidth
> resources.
>
> I'd be happy to provide some legwork (testing, doing some sanity
> checks on stuff in the kernel source code, etc.) if that would help.
> I am a registered ADC member and I'm willing to get my hands dirty to
> get this fixed. I've set up four-dozen OS X stations up in my
> company, as well as 200 linux stations, all of which access our Xserve
> for mail. It was very embarassing when we switched from our email
> hosting provider (who used OpenBSD) to our own Apple Xserve (I didn't
> want to have to learn to configure courier+cyrus+postfix+whatever all
> by myself on a Linux server) that we had so many problems for so long
> and it took two months to narrow it down to an apparently arbitrarily
> small value for kern.maxproc (and launchd).
>
> ~ Nathan
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--
-mmw
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