Re: dbimport - 512MB RAM not enough?

Chris: Your insight was indeed very helpful - the AIX ulimit values were clearly part of the problem: > : > what is the size of the dbimport process? > > : It fluctuates wildly - from an initial 1700 K to a max of over 40MB, up > : and down while the import proceeds. This does NOT correlate with overall > : memory use, which steadily increases until it crashes. > > Just random guess. My AIX has ulimit default to 32MB of memory per process. > Is this causing your crash? But I just wonder why dbimport need so much > memory and your import has so much activities on rootdbs. Because, > at least on IDS 7, dbimport performs non-logging operation during imports.. As you suggested, I increased the ulimit memory parameters for root and informix to "unlimited" - the dbimport now gets significantly farther, the resident size of the dbimport process now reaches 65MB or more at times, and it now seems to use the available swap more effectively. However, it still crashes - eventually all real memory, and most (though NOT all) of the inadequate swap space is exhausted when it does. The obvious next step is to add more swap - I will do so, and try again. One thing still puzzles me - when dbimport gets large (as when a very long table is loading), it is allocated memory as needed - but when it finishes that step, although dbimport's resident size shrinks back to less than 2MB, the memory allocated to it seems never to be released - when it starts to grow again, still more is allocated; eventually there is none left. Any thoughts on why that would be so, or how to modify this? (BTW, to answer your question - no, I don't know whether AIX 4 was ever an officially approved platform for this old Informix Online 5.02; perhaps someone on the group knows? I do want to switch to a current 7.x version as soon as I can get this data situated rationally - that's why I started this whole project - to free up contiguous space for the upgrade.) Regards, Don Miller Network Operations JFK University