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List:       rpmorg-maint
Subject:    [Rpm-maint] Scalability of RPM
From:       christoph.wissing () desy ! de (Christoph Wissing)
Date:       2008-08-30 14:42:28
Message-ID: 20080830164228.4ac9abd7.christoph.wissing () desy ! de
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Dear RPM experts,

I have a potential problem with the scalability of RPM. Let me briefly describe the \
use case. RPM is used to manage the software of the CMS-Experiment \
(http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/). Some might have read about the creation of black \
whole in context of these experiments (Rubbish!). But what's the problem with RPM? At \
some point, when quite some software is installed there are problems with the RPM \
database and all rpm commands that want to install new software stop with this error:

memory alloc (4 bytes) returned NULL. 

The number can be different, but 4 is rather pupular. Often it helps to remove some \
software, but some even the erase command fails with the same error.

The problem only appears on 32-bit (Linux) plattforms, the most used distibution is \
Scientific Linux 4, a recompiled RedHat Enterprise like CentOS. Some investigations \
have shown that the rpm command allocates more and more memory and when it reaches \
about 2GB it crashes. Running on 64-bit shows actually the same (very high) memory \
usage, but the task seems not to crash, most like because the system can just \
allocate more memory for a task.

The question is if there can be done something about it and if there some limitations \
known. The number of files that are actually stored are quite big, some millions \
easyly. But on the other hand installing a complete Linux distribution with several \
kernels and headers show end up with a number of files in the same order of \
magnitude.

Can someone from you help? What additional information do you need? The databases are \
a bit large (200MB) to attach them to this mail.

Any help is very welcome!

Thanks a lot in advance and best wishes,

Christoph

-- 
+-----------------------------------+
> Christoph Wissing       DESY - IT |
> E-Mail: christoph.wissing at desy.de |
> Phone:  +49(0)40/8998-4122        |
+-----------------------------------+


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