accessing a system with high load

From: Holger.VanKoll@SWISSCOM.COM
Date: Thu Feb 27 2003 - 09:14:45 EST


Hello,

I am thinking about what to do to ensure access to a system where some
application uses that much paging-space that connections
(telnet/ssh/getty) cant be made anymore (fork fails).

Aix5.1 has the ability (shconf) to do certain things if certain-priority
apps dont get cpu anymore.
Also, one could start a high-priority ssh-daemon on bootup.

Thats fine, but I solves the problem when applications consume too much
cpu. That doesnt help if they consume too much paging-space.
As far as I see even ulimit/wlm has no way to solve this problem.

I could try to start sshd with plock(); but that would only get sshd up
running... any command started from there still fails (fork - not enough
memory available now).

So far, I see no other possibility than to increase paging-space and set
high values for npswarn and npskill (vmtune).
The only disadvantage I currently see is more disk-usage for
paging-space.

What do you think / what do you do to ensure access to a high-paging
system?

Regards,

Holger



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