Taming CVS (was: Unidentified subject!)

[Derek Simkowiak <dereks kd-dev com>]

> problems with the anoncvs mirrors. The load average on Phil's server is at
> 70. The server I help run at CUC is now refusing telnet connections
> because I turned anoncvs back on. Mandrake's server is at load average
> 180, with over 200 people using it at the moment.

     AnonCVS maintainers:
	My name is Derek Simkowiak.  I own the anonymous CVS server for
the "Golgotha Forever" project, the GPLed continuation of crack.com's
"Golgotha" game (www.golgotha.com).

	I experienced similar problems with our CVS server.  I actually
got to the point that I was getting "kernel: Unable to load
interpreter" errors.  It seems that CVS will eat up as many resources as
it can.  I got around this by putting the following lines in my rc.local:


# System tuning: to prevent CVS from crashing the system:
echo 32768 > /proc/sys/kernel/file-max
echo "512 1024 2048" > /proc/sys/vm/freepages
#echo 49152 >/proc/sys/kernel/inode-max 


	Appearantly, these lines restrict the amount of resources that any
one process can use (?).  I found these lines in an email archive from
April of 1997.  Mr. Jon Lewis (jlewis@fdt.net), the author of the email,
didn't know where to find documentation on those /proc files, and I still
know know exactly what they do.  If anyone out there can point me to the
docs, I'd be grateful.

	But the point is CVS no longer crashes my system.  The Golgotha
CVS modules are several dozen megs in size, so it makes a difference on
our project.  You may want to try something similar on your servers.

	Perhaps someone should add a resource restriction option to CVS?
:)

	Hope this helps.


Derek Simkowiak
dereks@kd-dev.com
http://www.kd-dev.com