from research on this mailing list and others, it seems it is very common to have to increase the default value of NMBCLUSTERS under a heavy load. most often, it seems to have been increased to 8192 or 16384.
Unfortunately, under openBSD 3.1, any attempt to increase NMBCLUSTERS over 4096 results in a kernel panic at boot. I inquired about this problem and requested assistance on one of the OpenBSD mailing lists. the prevailing sentiment seemed to be "don't tweak kernel variables" and "you deserve what you get if you do". I'm under no delusion of entitlement, but I really expected more from the OpenBSD community. In any case, I was wondering if anyone has placed an OpenBSD 3.1 firewall under heavy load yet. I have done some limited testing, but my test environment is not sufficient to completely emulate the production load. I really don't want to put a firewall into production that runs out of a critical network resource which I am then unable to increase. I have 2 GB of RAM in this machine -- I would much rather have unused buffers than ever run out. -- Paul B. Henson | (909) 869-3781 | http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/ Operating Systems and Network Analyst | [EMAIL PROTECTED] California State Polytechnic University | Pomona CA 91768
