AIX

Hi, I have and IB RS/6000 machine running 32-bit AIX 4.3.3. We have a directory that is NFS mounted to this machine. Whenever I run the "ls" command in this directory, I get the following error: 0653-340 There is not enough memory available now

There was originally 512 MB of memory in this system and I doubled it to 1024 MB of memory but I still get the same error.

I Googled this error message and saw that another user got this same error message when running the "ls" command in an NFS mounted directory on an AIX machine. The user was only told that this was not a memory problem.

I am hoping someone can help me with the following questions:
1) What is causing this issue?
2) How can I resolve this issue?
One thing to note is that I want to solve the overlying issue and not a workaround for using find instead of ls. The "ls" issue is just a symptom of the problem.


Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

What is so special about that NFS mount then?
Because although I can remember having heard of something of the sort, I am quite sure I could not reproduce the case, what happend when you type ls on that FS, does it freese ?
I doubt it has to do with RAM... I have systems running with 512MB and run happily...

Hi VBE,

Thanks for your reply.

If I type "ls" in any directory other than the NFS mounted directory, it will give me the results immediately. The NFS mounted directory has many files and subdirectories in it. Most of the other directories on this machine have very little in them. In fact, if I go into a subdirectory of the NFS mounted directory, I can run "ls" and it will quickly give me the results.

Some more info that further complicates this issue:
This issue was first brought to me by a programmer because everytime he ran the "make" command on this mounted directory and even its subdirectories, the cursor would just hang. Unlike the "ls" command, the problem did not go away when he tried to run make from a subdirectory of the NFS mounted directory. He would eventually have to use "ctrl + C" to stop the "make" command.

I am wondering if this issue is being caused by the number of files and folders in the mounted directory.

Im tempted to say yes... and no...
NFS mounted FS is for your system a Remote FS your system is not responsible for, so when it comes to write, cache etc your system relies on the remote server...
Lets imagine your AIX beeing paranoid ( like they used to in 4.3 ) and you, found a way of letting your system cache the way it would for local FS, since its network your system would not be aware of what is going on the remote side and so can your system guarantee data integrity with its cache?
No...
So to improve performance of remote file access there is a mechanism of read-ahead and write-ahead provided by the biods...
That said you can try troubleshooting with

Code:

netstat -s
netstat -p <protocol>
netstat -i
netstat -r
nfsstat

for a start to see if all is OK or needs a bit of tuning...

I would also go at the NFS mountpoint and use find to look if there arent any ls and make files there that are executables.. ( I remembered a spoof with ls... )

How many files is many? Because yes, even on local FS a big amount of files will give ls a headache..

Q: How much paging space do you have now ( was it changed after adding more RAM?) and its usage?

Code:

 lsps -a

and though I doubt, but never know...

Code:

lssrc -s biod

Hi vbe,

I ran both commands.

Below are the results for lsps -a:

Code:

 Page Space:  hd6
 Physical Volume:  hdisk0
 volume group:  rootvg
 size:  1024 MB
 % used:  1
 Active:  yes
 Auto:  yes
 Type:  lv

Below are the results for lssrc -s biod:

Code:

 Subsystem:  biod
 Group:  nfs
 PID:  8262
 Status:  active

Thanks.

---------- Post updated at 09:33 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:05 AM ----------

I also ran the following command to get a count of the number of files in the problematic directory:

Code:

find /directoryA/* -print | wc -l

It returned the following error message:

Code:

/usr/bin/ksh:  0403-029  There is not enough memory available now.

Moderator's Comments:

Start using code tags please.