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Status Not under consideration
Workspace AIX
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 30, 2016

Per-process core compression setting

The core compression option is used to manage volume for a sizable influx of core dumps generated by application code. There were also important, though obsolescent, reasons for requiring compression that had to do with highly unfavorable dump-related VMM & IO actions occurring in the interrupt context.

Use case: Supposing a 64-bit application requires a core dump and has a large 24GB heap. With compression off, the core destages in approx. 75 seconds on a POWER8 system with fast storage. But with compression on (the company standard), the core destages in upwards of an hour. In the compression case, the dump time is sometimes not practical: it interferes with the timely signaling to the parent process; and it may not compress well, leading to a core that would be larger than the uncompressed copy.

So there is a need to access either mode of operation. Request the ability to set the compression setting ad-hoc on a per-process basis.

Technical notes: The understanding is that these attributes are part of an extended userinfo struct (U_uinfoxp) that's part of struct user (sys/user.h). Suggest an environment variable override to the per-user setting.
Similar to the way CORE_MMAP and CORE_NOSHM are used, suggest:
CORE_COMPRESSION=ON
CORE_COMPRESSION=OFF

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 25, 2019

    IBM has evaluated the priority of this enhancement proposal relative to other future product content and determined that this RFE will not be pursued for a future product release.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Aug 31, 2016

    Creating a new RFE based on Community RFE #93757 in product IBM AIX.