Forum OpenACS Q&A: HowTo on raising shared memory

I hope that I am not the only one interested in raising shared memory for postgres. How about expanding the Tips on Postgres by Don with more specific information on

a.) how to increase shared memory within a Kernel > 2.4.x
b.) how to do a kernel recompile on linux with a Kernel < 2.4.x

On a.) Petru and Todd gave some valueable (insight), but it might be completed somehow.

For beginners it is little things like the one from Guido van Driel that told me to check on the current status of shared memory with the command "ipcs"

Maybe the Tips by Don can be integrated an enhanced with Roberto's Simple Installation Guide. That's where it is supposed to be sitting I believe.

I know that raising shared memory is only interesting for higher scaling sites, but its those sites that spread the word.

Thanks

Yes, this information should be in our installation guide and my "Tips" stuff should be integrated as well.

Are you interested in volunteering, by any chance?

I've got to warn folks that I served for 15 years on the board of directors of one of Oregon's largest grassroots - i.e. volunteer-driven - conservation organizations.  I've got a *lot* of experience twisting folks' arms to get work out of them.  "Are you interested in volunteering" is one of my favorite phrases!

I could write it up this weekend.  (Provided of course that I find a new fsck-ing apartment (in San Francisco, natch!))  I suppose I'm volunteering since my name is already in the thread, and like blood->water->sharks, well anyway..

Of course I will test and then try to improve the already written doc.

I believe that my perspective might be valueable for some people, because I would see things that might be too common or easy for Todd.

When I grow up I will write my own docs Don. I promise!!!

I wrote a kernel and security doc a while ago (it is a little raggedy, but certainly usable) for RedHat as well as Oracle. All of the optimizations and security stuff should be relevant.

Feel free to look at it. I will write an update when 2.4.x is stable enough to use, right now it is not ready for production (but almost).

It will include journalling and other goodies. Stay tuned.

The other one is : jongriffin.com/static

Roberto, Mainly the filesystem had some showstopper bugs. Luckily you weren't bitten but I would be very diligent about keeping up with any patches to the FS and etc.

Other than that 2.4.3 looks pretty good with the latest patches and I am going to install that tonight w/ Oracle and ReiserFS and pound on it.

David,

I am not sure what file-storage you are referring to! ACS file-storage or the problem that RH had with the Promise IDE bus?

As far as I know (I haven't downloaded 7.1) the promise bug was fixed. The other file system problems were taken care of in the kernel and the ReiserFS guys seem to think that all is stable (and I trust their judgement). I couldn't find a mirror that had an ISO image to download and try last night.

Also, Mandrake 8 is coming out any day now, although 7.2 was probably one of the worst releases I have ever seen, there is some hope for 8.0.

After living with RH and Mandrake for some time now, I tend to prefer RH's approach. I did convince Mandrake to get rid of that security flaw they call Zope, but they still insist on a 4 CD installation with CUPS and MySQL and other crap that I just have to spend 2-3 hours removing.

Well I can say that I am running it on all my boxes and some are getting 40-50,000 hits/day and yesterday my init went crazy and process 1 died (never seen that before). I did a cold boot and reiser came right up. No hassle, no Oracle complaints, no problems.

Jon,

Your post above seems to indicate that you are running Oracle on kernel 2.4. Is that the case? We have been contemplating this but didn't know if it was fraught with danger.

Even though we have a support contract with Oracle we are running Debian on our servers, not one of the "supported" distributions.

It appears that 2.4 would be huge win for Oracle, esp. on an SMP box with lots of RAM.

Jon,

You mentioned you would update your website with info.

What's the URL?

Thanks!

Louis

I still don't have a RH 7.1 distro to use. All the mirrors are full. If it is not for sale at a local store, it may be a while.

You can look on jongriffin.com/static for some older docs.

You can find more on the DocBook things in this thread. You need to fetch the ldp.dsl and install it the right way. The direct URL for the LDP howto: http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LDP-Author-Guide/usingldpdsssl.html.

To edit them docs I suggest you use Emacs, it will make life not just a whole lot easier, but goes from impossible to very doable. There are a couple of Emacs keybindings that will save the day:

• C-c <: insert a tag, with context sensitive auto completions [press tab or enter]: If a tag is not allowed according to the DTD, emacs won't insert it.
• C-c /: closes the last open tag.
• There are more, for a full set of (SGML) keybindings: C-h b

Another neat thing is the document validation checker (in one of the menus, don't know the keybinding). Remember to use the extension .sgml, otherwise Emacs will not figure out you're doing sgml, AFAIK.

If you get the latest acs3-pg from CVS, you'll find a readme in acs3-pg/www/doc/openacs/src explaining howto create the HTMLs from the SGML. Have fun.

FYI, I have never used DocBook (so far), but if you want to name your files .xml or something instead of .sgml, you should be able to use something like the below to tell emacs to still use SGML mode for those files. This example binds .adp files to html-mode:

;; Set additional editing modes. 
(setq auto-mode-alist
      (append '(
                (".adp$"  . html-mode)
                ;; insert other modes here 
                ) auto-mode-alist))

Btw, I am no emacs-lisp expert so the above may not be the best way to do it. But it seems to work.