I believe shmmax is a limit, preventing a single process from
using more more than this. This sounds like it's essentially
unlimited.  There's no performance impact, unless the sum of
all shared mem (see ipcs) becomes significant and performance
degrades.  On the other hand, if a lower limit is set and an
application requires more shared mem than allowed by shmmax,
the allocation (and application) would fail, which can be
very undesirable.

Limiting shmmax might limit swapping indirectly, by inhibiting
the operation of processes (via failure).  I think it would be
better to manage system load in other ways.

Cheers,
-Bob Arendt

On 11/05/09 00:43, Corey Kovacs wrote:
Looking at some 64 bit machines I have running RHEL5.4, I noticed that
the shmmax settings in sysctl.conf are getting set to 64GB. The machines
only have from 16 to 32GB. Is this normal on a 64bit load? Seems like a
good way to end up swapping.

Corey

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