"Couldn't write state file" problem...

Annika
Annika
Joined: 8 Aug 06
Posts: 720
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Afaik, Einstein is one of the

Afaik, Einstein is one of the projects which need relatively little memory (right now, the WU running on my FreeBSD desktop PC takes up 60 MB), so I don't really think this could make a difference. I used to run BOINC on a laptop with only 512 MB RAM, minus at least 16 for the graphics card, and don't remember this kind of error (under both Windows and various Linux distros). Right now my boxes both have 2 GB, which is rather much but less than what yours had before the update, and BOINC doesn't even come close to using them up... although it might, of course, depend on what else is running on your system.

Elphidieus
Elphidieus
Joined: 20 Feb 05
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Hi Annika, I do understand

Hi Annika,

I do understand that Einstein does not take up as much physical memory, as each instances only takes up to about 50MB; my being 7 instances, that accounts for no more than 400MB RAM. However, what peanut and I (and in deed the rest of us) were referring to was the instances of shared memory.

With the increase of both physical and shared memory, at this moment it's close to 16 hours and there's still no sign of the error messages. Perhaps Peanut can explain if there's a correlation between the error messages, and the inactive and actual free memory that might play a role here. Prior to my 2GB upgrade, a whole of 3GBs were allocated for active and inactivity aka memory caching, leaving almost nil for free memory. Right now I seemed to have about 3.5GB of active and inactive memory while the remaining 1.5GB are free (useless) memory.

Looks like I might have to put on some load onto my V8 to find out... *grins

Annika
Annika
Joined: 8 Aug 06
Posts: 720
Credit: 494410
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Goodness, what kinda boxes

Goodness, what kinda boxes you use makes me drool ;-) 8 (?) cores and 5 GB of RAM? Very nice indeed.
As for the shared memory thing... okay got that now... and I've been bugged by bad problems with that, too. Running Kubuntu 7.10 on my laptop, my last 50 or so Einstein WUs errored out, due to "shared memory" problems. I'm at a complete loss.

peanut
peanut
Joined: 4 May 07
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Annika, have you ever tried

Annika, have you ever tried to find out how to modify shared memory on Linux? I googled the subject and it seems like Linux and the Mac OS may be similar. The Mac OS is very Unix like when using Terminal.

Does the 'sysctl -a' command work for Linux. If grep also works you could do sysctl -a | grep shm.
sysctl is a status command and should not change anything. You might want to do some sort of help lookup on sysctl to be sure.

On my Mac
sysctl -a | grep shm
gives
kern.sysv.shmmax: 16777216
kern.sysv.shmmin: 1
kern.sysv.shmmni: 128
kern.sysv.shmseg: 32
kern.sysv.shmall: 4096

Shared Memory Details

Here are what the particular shared memory kernel settings mean:
shmmax
Maximum size of a shared memory segment
shmmin
Minimum size of a shared memory segment
shmmni
Maximum number of separate shared memory id's
shmseg
Maximum number of shared memory segments per user
shmall
Maximum amount of shared memory (measured in pages). This is generally shmmax divided by 4096.

If you see something like I show above you may be able to follow the same instructions that increase the shared memory block in Macs. I posted a link to a web page in the Mac Beta test thread.

this link talks about sysctl on IBM Linux

tullio
tullio
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 2118
Credit: 61407735
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RE: Annika, have you ever

Message 75499 in response to message 75498

Quote:

Annika, have you ever tried to find out how to modify shared memory on Linux? I googled the subject and it seems like Linux and the Mac OS may be similar. The Mac OS is very Unix like when using Terminal.

Does the 'sysctl -a' command work for Linux. If grep also works you could do sysctl -a | grep shm.
sysctl is a status command and should not change anything. You might want to do some sort of help lookup on sysctl to be sure.

On my Mac
sysctl -a | grep shm
gives
kern.sysv.shmmax: 16777216
kern.sysv.shmmin: 1
kern.sysv.shmmni: 128
kern.sysv.shmseg: 32
kern.sysv.shmall: 4096

Shared Memory Details

Here are what the particular shared memory kernel settings mean:
shmmax
Maximum size of a shared memory segment
shmmin
Minimum size of a shared memory segment
shmmni
Maximum number of separate shared memory id's
shmseg
Maximum number of shared memory segments per user
shmall
Maximum amount of shared memory (measured in pages). This is generally shmmax divided by 4096.

If you see something like I show above you may be able to follow the same instructions that increase the shared memory block in Macs. I posted a link to a web page in the Mac Beta test thread.

this link talks about sysctl on IBM Linux


Just for the record, this is what I get on SuSE 10.1. no errors:
vm.hugetlb_shm_group = 0
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.shmall = 268435200
kernel.shmmax = 4294967295
Tullio

Jord
Joined: 26 Jan 05
Posts: 2952
Credit: 5779100
RAC: 0

Peanut, you may have been

Peanut, you may have been looking for this: Managing Kernel Resources. :-)

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