NSS Volumes and Available Memory

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Mar 2001

Dear Ab-end: I have a question about NSS volumes and available memory. I want to set the NSS volumes to use, for example, 40% of available memory. (I have almost a terabyte of disk space, so this is pretty important.) Is this 40% of available memory when NSS is loaded, or does NSS take and release 40% of available memory during the time period it is loaded? In other words, is it dynamically getting and releasing memory as other modules are loading and unloading?

Also, I'd like to know if there is a standard way to figure out how much available memory I should reserve for the NSS volumes. I don't want to lock up the server machine if NSS has taken up too much memory. Do you have any ideas?

Wondering about NSS Caching in Wyoming

Dear Wondering: The available memory is the most memory that NSS can get. The other value--the cache balance timer--is decisive. This timer is set to 30 seconds by default. So every 30 seconds, the system will check to see if the memory pool allocated to NSS is not too high. If it is, the system will return the memory back to the main pool.

You can set a fixed value for NSS in /MinBufferCacheSize and then disable the balancing. For more information, see the following documents:

http://www.novell.com/products/nss/nssmemoryconfig.html

http://www.novell.com/products/nss/faq.html

(Answer supplied by Ahmad Sadeghpour, Novell, Inc.)

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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