[discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[nqxjlwvb via illumos-discuss]

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I assigned 8GB of RAM to the OpenIndiana VM but pkg update is still unhappy. The default swap volume size is 2GB. I have tried to bump the swap space many times until I reached the reasonable value that pkg update agreed to work, which is 16GB, or twice the amount of physical RAM I assigned to this VM.
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Re: [discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[Joshua M. Clulow via illumos-discuss]

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On Sat, 14 Dec 2024, 00:57 nqxjlwvb via illumos-discuss, <
discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:

> I assigned 8GB of RAM to the OpenIndiana VM but pkg update is still
> unhappy.
>

How do you mean unhappy?  What was the output from the tool?

The default swap volume size is 2GB. I have tried to bump the swap space
> many times until I reached the reasonable value that pkg update agreed to
> work, which is 16GB, or twice the amount of physical RAM I assigned to this
> VM.
>

At a high level: illumos systems do not overcommit memory.  If a program
allocates 1GB with malloc(), then 1GB of space is required to make a
reservation for that program to run.  That reservation can be backed by RAM
or by swap files.  If you have an 8GB VM, some amount of that memory will
go to various overheads in the kernel and system software.  If you run
programs that end up allocating more than is left over, you'll need swap to
back those allocations.


Cheers.

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Re: [discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[Toomas Soome via illumos-discuss]

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> On 14. Dec 2024, at 10:57, nqxjlwvb via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> 
> I assigned 8GB of RAM to the OpenIndiana VM but pkg update is still unhappy. The default swap volume size is 2GB. I have tried to bump the swap space many times until I reached the reasonable value that pkg update agreed to work, which is 16GB, or twice the amount of physical RAM I assigned to this VM.
> illumos <https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest> / illumos-discuss / see discussions <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss> + participants <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members> + delivery options <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription>Permalink <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T187223d61705d33f-M8981fa371c6cd82da04d1564>
tsoome@test:~$ swap -lh
swapfile             dev    swaplo   blocks     free
/dev/zvol/dsk/ctest/swap 273,2        4K    4.00G    4.00G

but, the root cause and curse there is the implementation of pkg itself. It is memory hog and the number of installed packages will determine the amount of ram it does consume. my test host above does not have gui bits installed.

There have been some attempts over the year to improve it but they have failed, it most likely needs much more radical approach — like to use sqllite or something and stop bloating memory with python. Part of the problem also is that we are depending a bit too much on drops we get from Oracle and having too few devs to maintain the code we have. Rather shameful we haven't been able to fix pkg over all the years, but thats where we are.

rgds,
toomas
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Re: [discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[Goetz T. Fischer via illumos-discuss]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 03:57:23 -0500, nqxjlwvb via illumos-discuss wrote:
> I assigned 8GB of RAM to the OpenIndiana VM but pkg update is still unhappy. The default swap 
> volume size is 2GB. I have tried to bump the swap space many times until I reached the reasonable 
> value that pkg update agreed to work, which is 16GB, or twice the amount of physical RAM I 
> assigned to this VM.

i can't confirm that. i always use 512mb swap and never ran into problems with pkg because of that.

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Re: [discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[nqxjlwvb via illumos-discuss]

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My installation of OpenIndiana is brand new from the 2024.04 image. It seems the number of packages need to be updated have growth significantly since then.
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Re: [discuss] Why does illumos need so much of swap space?

[nqxjlwvb via illumos-discuss]

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Hi OpenIndiana developers. What do  you think about monthly snapshots to reduce the number of packages need to be updated for each new installation? Monthly snapshot is updated installation media that is released each month.
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