Sun Microsystems manual Limiting the physical main memory consumption of a project, 110

Version 3.1-enSolaris 10 Container Guide - 3.1 5. Cookbooks Effective: 30/11/2009

5.5.10. Limiting the physical main memory consumption of a project

[dd]To limit the physical main memory of a project, the resource capping daemon rcapd(1M) can be used. If the resident set size (RSS) of a project exceeds the capping target (rcap.max-rssin bytes), rcapd reduces the RSS and swaps used memory pages to the paging device. rcapd is configured by rcapadm(1M) and monitored with rcapstat(1). The rcapd can be used in zones in connection with projects and can limit the physical main memory consumption of a project within a zone.

It is recommended to limit virtual memory (called swap) first and then considering a limit for physical main memory, since this limit is a hard limit and is noticed more quickly in case of a misconfiguration (f.e. 20 GB cache for the database instead of 2 GB). In such a case, the sole limitation of physical memory consumption would have an extreme effect on the performance of this zone and potentially affect other zones as well.

5.5.11. Implementing memory resource management for zones

[dd]According to 4.6.3 Limiting memory resources, the virtual, physical and locked main memory of a zone can be limited starting with Solaris 10 8/07. The configuration for this takes place in the zone configuration.

global # zonecfg -z zone1 zonecfg:zone1> add capped-memory zonecfg:zone1:capped-memory> set physical=50m zonecfg:zone1:capped-memory> set swap=200m zonecfg:zone1:capped-memory> set locked=20m zonecfg:zone1:capped-memory> end zonecfg:zone1> commit

zonecfg:zone1> exit

The configuration of capping parameters for a zone and restart of a zone leads to the automatic start- up of the rcapd daemon in the global zone, which undertakes resource management. The activity of rcapd can be observed with rcapstat -z.

global	# rcapstat -z
id	zone	nproc	vm	rss	cap	at avgat		pg avgpg
21	zone1	29	42M	57M	50M	12M	0K	8584K	0K
21	zone1	29	42M	57M	50M	6752K	0K	6712K	0K
21	zone1	-	26M	29M	50M	0K	0K	0K	0K
21	zone1	-	26M	29M	50M	0K	0K	0K	0K
id	zone	nproc	vm	rss	cap	at avgat		pg avgpg
21	zone1	-	18M	22M	50M	0K	0K	0K	0K
21	zone1	-	17M	18M	50M	0K	0K	0K	0K
id	zone	nproc	vm	rss	cap	at avgat		pg avgpg
22	zone1	29	42M	57M	50M	12M	0K	8672K	0K
22	zone1	29	42M	57M	50M	10M	0K	7776K	0K
22	zone1	-	42M	43M	50M	0K	0K	0K	0K

Memory capping settings with zonecfg are static. If changes to the settings during the zone's runtime are required, they can be carried out using the command rcapadm without rebooting the zone.

rcapadm -z zone1 -m 40m

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