[PATCH 1/8] Scaling msgmni to the amount of lowmem

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:16:47 +0100 Nadia.Derbey at bull.net wrote:

> [PATCH 01/08]
> 
> This patch computes msg_ctlmni to make it scale with the amount of lowmem.
> msg_ctlmni is now set to make the message queues occupy 1/32 of the available
> lowmem.
> 
> Some cleaning has also been done for the MSGPOOL constant: the msgctl man page
> says it's not used, but it also defines it as a size in bytes (the code
> expresses it in Kbytes).
> 

Something's wrong here.  Running LTP's msgctl08 (specifically:
ltp-full-20070228) cripples the machine.  It's a 4-way 4GB x86_64.

http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/config-x.txt
http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/dmesg-x.txt

Normally msgctl08 will complete in a second or two.  With this patch I
don't know how long it will take to complete, and the machine is horridly
bogged down.  It does recover if you manage to kill msgctl08.  Feels like
a terrible memory shortage, but there's plenty of memory free and it isn't
swapping.