12TB GEOM stripe, newfs, then fsck: cannot alloc 768053748 bytes for blockmap

Alex Zbyslaw xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Wed Jun 8 17:37:40 GMT 2005

Tony Shadwick wrote:

> Did I just understand you right, or did you just say that the default 
> amount of RAM that FreeBSD allows in the kernel is 512MB without 
> throwing that switch at compile time????
> Aw crap.  If you're right, you just explained one of the grander 
> mysteries I'm experiencing with one of my boxes that keeps 
> experiencing symptoms of running out of RAM....

That's what comes of reading LINT (4.X) and NOTES (5.X) <smug> :-)

It's the default amount of RAM that a single process is allowed to 
consume, assuming "limit datasize unlimited".  It basically defines what 
unlimited means, as I understand it.  Found it when running some tricky 
conversion jobs on large data files... Looks like you can fix it without 
recompiling though.  See Dan Nelson's message...

There's also a max for stack size and for the default.


# Certain applications can grow to be larger than the 512M limit
# that FreeBSD initially imposes.  Below are some options to
# allow that limit to grow to 1GB, and can be increased further
# with changing the parameters.  MAXDSIZ is the maximum that the
# limit can be set to, and the DFLDSIZ is the default value for
# the limit.  MAXSSIZ is the maximum that the stack limit can be
# set to.  You might want to set the default lower than the max,
# and explicitly set the maximum with a shell command for processes
# that regularly exceed the limit like INND.
options         MAXDSIZ=(1024UL*1024*1024)
options         MAXSSIZ=(256UL*1024*1024)
options         DFLDSIZ=(256UL*1024*1024)


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list