Re: linux DBA's: O_Direct

  • From: Mark Brinsmead <mark.brinsmead@xxxxxxx>
  • To: dbvision@xxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:51:58 -0700

Nuno,

Thanks for the excellent links. It appears that I do indeed have my pagecache parameters out if order. Apparently my sysadmins trust me more than they should...

As for allowing my pagecache to grow to 25% of RAM (on a server running nothing but Oracle), I'm not so sure... 15% of my 8GB sounds like a pretty generous allottment for caching executables and filesystem I/O. Of course, the "right" values will differ for everybody... That said, I'll give a careful read to the links you provided before revising my settings. :-)

Cheers,
-- Mark.


Nuno Souto wrote:

Quoting MARK BRINSMEAD <mark.brinsmead@xxxxxxx>:



[...]

Adding the entry:
  vm.pagecache 5 15 10
to /etc/sysctl.conf should (if I *now* recall correctly) set the minimum,
maximum, and "target" filesystem buffers to 5%, 15%, and 10% of RAM
respectively.

[...]




Hmmm, I'd have a quick look at:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/vm/
near the end of the page, just in case:

those values for pagecache don't sound good.

A better choice would be 5 15 25.
Ie, never make the max smaller than what the borrow value is.

In general terms:

the first parameter is the size of cache (relative to memory size) below which the vm will start to reclaim pages exclusively from process cache.
the second parameter is the size of cache (relative to memory size) below
which the vm will start to reclaim pages from both file system cache and
process cache.
the third parameter is the size of cache (relative to memory size) that vm
will use for both process page cache and file system cache.
in general, cache (both process and file) is reduced as memory is needed for running processes, within the boundaries defined above.


This also does a darn good job of explaining the mechanics of all that
(and the whys of the process/file cache): http://surriel.com/lectures/ols2003/


Enjoy. Nuno Souto
from sunny Sydney
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l








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