Thanks, I've implemented these changes on our "spare" box and it seems to be 
handling these large result searches without stalling and it appears to be 
faster too which is a bonus :-)

I'll look to implementing these settings and SHM on the production servers 
sometime next week.

It might be worth adding a note not to change the sysctl settings unless they 
are currently too small on your given platform- taking that into account 
implementing the SHM key was simply a case
of running ipcs -m and picking a value that wasn't already in use.

Many thanks and have a good weekend,

Mark

On 27 Sep 2012, at 16:46, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:

> --On Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:21 AM +0100 Mark Cairney 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 26 Sep 2012, at 22:36, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
>> 
>>> --On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 11:59 AM +0100 Mark Cairney
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> My olcDB values are listed below (minus the olcDbConfig entries). I'm
>>>> not sure if you need the indexes but I've left them in anyway:
>>>> 
>>> 
>>>> olcDbCacheFree: 1
>>>> olcDbCacheSize: 400000
>>>> olcDbIDLcacheSize: 1200000
>>> 
>>>> set_cachesize 4 0 1
>>> 
>>> This may be a little small. I prefer to fully cache my DB.
>> 
>> Which one in particular? I thought the set_cachesize had an upper limit
>> of 4GB but your guidance on the Zimbra website suggests this is an old
>> limit and I now can't find the page on the OpenLDAP site which discusses
>> it. Alternatively would increasing the number of caches from 2 to 2 or 3
>> be a suitable workaround?
> 
> BDB 4.2.52 had an upper limit of 4 GB segments.  Since you aren't running BDB 
> 4.2.52, you have no such limit.
> 
> 
>> Given that I've got a relatively healthy amount of RAM available would
>> the following sound sensible to you
>> 
>> olcDbCacheSize: 1000000
>> olcDbIDLcacheSize: 1200000
>> set_cachesize 4 0 2
> 
> I would do set_cachesize 8 0 0
> 
>> I also want to give a bit of headroom for new user accounts (approx rate
>> of increase 80,000/y) and creating a group object for each user.
> 
> Ok.
> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> I'm not using an SHM key (should I be?).
>>> 
>>> So with 300,000 users, your caches look fine.  I would definitely
>>> recommend using an SHM key if you are going to stick with using BDB.  I
>>> personally prefer using MDB with current RE24 these days. It is
>>> magnitudes faster than BDB in all aspects if you enable write map.
>> 
>> I've looked at your guidance on using SHM keys but I'm slightly reluctant
>> to start playing around with kernel settings on production servers :-)
>> The existing default settings on RHEL 5 seem massive in comparison though:
>> kernel.shmmax = 68719476736
>> 
>> kernel.shmall = 4294967296
>> 
>> Whereas based on the ZImbra performance tuning page I calculated (based
>> on 8GB BDB cache size + 0.5GB for other stuff)
>> 
>> shmall would be: 2228224
>> 
>> and shmmax:  8589934592
>> 
>> Both of which appear to be an order of magnitude smaller than the
>> defaults! Then there appears to be some Zimbra-specific commands but I'm
>> guessing the equivalent is just setting the olcDBShmKey in slapd.d on
>> vanilla OpenLDAP?
>> 
>> My plan in the longer term is to move to MDB but when I tried it out on
>> one of our test VMs (40GB HD) it pretty much devoured all available disk
>> space. Is there a rule of thumb for deriving probable MDB disk space
>> requirements based on existing BDB size?
>> 
>> Thanks for the help and apologies for all the additional questions!
>> 
>> Kind regards,
> 
> You only have to adjust the SHM bits in sysctl if the default values are not 
> large enough.  As for MDB, it generally takes about 2/3rds the space of BDB.
> 
> --Quanah
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Quanah Gibson-Mount
> Sr. Member of Technical Staff
> Zimbra, Inc
> A Division of VMware, Inc.
> --------------------
> Zimbra ::  the leader in open source messaging and collaboration
> 

/****************************

Mark R Cairney
ITI UNIX Section
Information Services

Tel: 0131 650 6565
Email: [email protected]

****************************/


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