*BSD News Article 84685


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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.mel.aone.net.au!news.vision.net.au!usenet
From: "David Benn" <dbenn@vision.net.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: News remalloc error
Date: 13 Dec 1996 00:11:59 GMT
Organization: Vision Internet Services.
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <01bbe88a$3291d6d0$0d1711cb@tethys>
NNTP-Posting-Host: tethys.vision.net.au
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1155
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5435

Someone recently asked a question here about a remalloc error in the Daily
Usenet report, and someone else quoted a section from the INN docs.

The advice given was basically to:

	1. Add "unlimit datasize" and possibly "limit openfiles 256".
	2. Increase the MAXDSIZ to 128M (options         MAXDSIZ=134217728 in
	   the kernel config files.

Since we have had a similar problem on our site - actually it occurs in the
daily.news
script code which does overview database expiry it seems - I thought I'd
try some of these remedies. In fact I tried all of them and it made no
difference. The error persists. What I get in the Daily Usenet Report is:

	Can't remalloc 9249516 bytes, Cannot allocate memory
	Renumbering active file.

The latter message is from the normal renumbering code after the overview
code in daily.news.

I have just been looking through some INN docs (from March 1996) and found
the following comment re: the error in question:

-------------------
Subject: ME cant remalloc xx bytes Cannot allocate memory

This probably means that innd wants to grow bigger than what the
actual limit for a single process is.
To solve this either rebuild your kernel with a different default max,
or add "unlimit datasize" to the beginning on your rc.news file.
-------------------

Now, on our system, the MAXUSERS kernel value is already 128. Any point in
pushing this higher?

I would very much appreciate any comments/suggestions on this.

Rgds,

David Benn