About

Martin Klier

usn-it.de

Setting ulimit -m in AIX

AIX has its own rules, as I have to discover these days. Coming across ulimit, I found out that smitty configures value A here and value B completely elsewhere. Hardest one so far has been “ulimit -m” (“Specifies the size of physical memory, in number of K bytes.” a user can assign), since I could not find where to specify it in smitty. At some point, I stopped investigating smitty, and went directly to

/etc/security/limits

but it did not become easier, nobody could tell me what’s the parameter for -m in limits’ terms. Some suspicion did go in direction “rss”, but oddly, lsuser delivered “rss=65536” and ulimit -a delivered “32768”. So at first glance, they did not seem to be connected despite a similar function description in documentation.

But finally, I came over Unix Essentials Blog and was told:

“ulimit -m” is “rss” in limits, so i specified

rss = -1
rss_hard = -1

and was happy. The lsuser command shows “rss=-1” and ulimit -m shows “unlimited” now. By the way: ulimit -m is specified in KB, rss in blocks …

Thanks to morsing in freenode’s #aix as well!

Regards
Usn

“Basics of Database Technology” again
Creating Oracle AWR reports quicksheet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.