Re: [Summary-Talk] Open log file errors

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/24/03 1:17 PM Jeff Logan (jefftalk@insideout.com) wrote:

>Thanks for all of the descriptions, when it comes to the vnode issue 
>you have posted a work around, but I have found that OS X just does 
>not release vnodes at all.  My server was using 16,000 after a 
>reboot.  I moved this number up to 100,000 just for testing purposes 
>after a month I was at that level.

Yea, the situation is somewhat more complex than I initially thought. 
There simply isn't any way to know if you are "really" running out of 
vnodes. It turns out that there are three categories of vnodes: in use, 
cached but available, and free. There is no way for us to distinguish 
between "in use" and "cached but available" vnodes. A true free count 
appears to be impossible without writing a kernel module.

Cached but available vnodes are saved in case the information they hold 
will be needed again soon, but will get reused when a vnode is needed and 
none are free, so they behave as if they are free for our purposes. 
However, they are reported as being in use.

This is now being discussed in some other places. No one from Apple has 
acknowledged the problem, despite some users frequent kernel panics that 
are fixed when more vnodes are allocated. I think that they are going to 
notice that there really is an issue soon, but it is impossible to know 
for sure.

Unfortunately, Apple has a policy of not acknowledging problems until the 
fix ships, unless they are very very severe. They normally won't say 
anything even when they are aware of the problem and have a fix for the 
next release. Which is of course the same reaction they have when they 
don't believe there is a problem in the first place.

>What can be done about this problem?  Where can we as users complain to 
>Apple?

You can try the Apple support discussion groups, 
<http://discussions.info.apple.com/> or the OS X feedback page, 
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/>.

Jason

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Jason@Summary.Net
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Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
  -- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets
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