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Status Delivered
Workspace AIX
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 11, 2018

Option to crash the system during low page condition

In an clustered environment, an application may encounter a rogue query that uses up all of the memory and subsequently the paging space in an lpar. Eventually that application will get killed by the pgspkill function in AIX. While this allows the OS to keep running, it may prevent an automatic failover to another lpar and may take some time before an admin notices that the process was killed. In a cluster deployment without any application monitoring if only certain processes are killed by the current functionality the application may remain online but be rendered unusable. Thus, the cluster will remain online and not trigger a failover until either communication across all heartbeat interfaces is lost or the source machine is halted or receives a kernel panic.

It is therefore desired to have a tunable feature that simply causes a kernel panic if the npskill threshold is reached. This request is for a new 'vmo' tunable that by default is not enabled. But when enabled, then rather than calling pgspkill() once the npskill threshold is reached, it should instead call panic(). Then HA can automatically fail over to another lpar and later the system dump can be used to determined to find the root cause.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 20, 2019

    This has been delivered in AIX 7.2 TL 4 (level 7200-04).

    A new npsassert vmo tunable is added that causes the LPAR to fail when the system runs out of paging space. More information is available on the following pages in the AIX 7.2 Infocenter:
    https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_aix_72/performance/assert_lpar.html
    https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_aix_72/v_commands/vmo.html

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 11, 2018

    I love this idea, because of the simplicity.

    The proper way would be WLM and HA application monitor, but the complexity there leaves much to be desired.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 11, 2018

    I love this idea, because of the simplicity.

    The proper way would be WLM and HA application monitor, but the complexity there leaves much to be desired.