[Xymon] winpsclient: what about "clientbbwinmembug" setting?

Fri Jun 10 14:53:30 CEST 2016

Hi Mario

Personally I think the labels are very misleading :(

Not sure why you're getting different results on different versions of OS, the figures come from WMI.

When clientbbwinmembug = 1 (the default):

*         Physical is physical, so that is OK.

*         Actual is swap as you say.

*         Swap is usually roughly the sum of physical + actual (swap).

When clientbbwin membug = 0, then the values for actual and swap should be exchanged (swap is swap and actual is roughly the sum of physical + swap).

However, Windows memory management is not simple. Some used "memory" might be in both the swap file and RAM and there are memory-mapped files and so on that make the usage figure hard to understand (which is why "page/swap" used does not equal real used + actual used). 

Also, some processes might be partially or totally swapped out of physical memory to the swap file, so you cannot say that Real used "is the sum total of memory utilizations of all the processes running on the server".

Incidentally, the client just gets the figures from this:

Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem

The client then does no processing other than a bit of subtraction to get the used amount (from total – free). So unfortunately any misreporting is usually because of WMI is misreporting it.

Cheers

Zak Beck
Infrastructure Tech Support Specialist
Accenture
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From: Mario DE CHENNO [mailto:MARIO.DECHENNO at unina2.it] 
Sent: 10 June 2016 13:16
To: Beck, Zak <zak.beck at accenture.com>; xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: winpsclient: what about "clientbbwinmembug" setting?

I was sure it was a legacy setting, and understand your point of view.

Anyway things are not totally clear for me....

I have a plain xymon 4.3.17 installation. Some memtests are presented as reported below.

As you can see, labels are different in bbwin and psclient reports. Furthermore, Swap value seems wrong for psclient on 2003.

Does still clientbbwinmembug default really matter? How are others dealing with that?

Mario

=======================================================

Windows server 2003 - BBwin 

 Memory Used   Total  Pctg

 Physical:     825M   4095M   20%

 Virtual:       35M   2047M    1%

[<- SWAP]

 Page:         576M   5976M    9%

Windows server 2003 - xymonclient.ps1  1.96 2015-01-21 

clientbbwinmembug  : 1

 Memory              Used       Total  Percentage

 Physical           2641M       8191M         32%

 Actual                8M       8191M          0%       

 Swap               2219M       9799M         22%

[where is SWAP? size is set to 2046-4092, it actually is 2046 MB]

Windows server 2012R2 - xymonclient.ps1  2.15 2016-02-03 

clientbbwinmembug  : 0

 Memory              Used       Total  Percentage

 Physical           1052M       8191M         12%

 Actual              835M       8191M         10%

 Swap                  0M       4096M          0%

[<- SWAP]

Windows server 2008 - xymonclient.ps1  2.02 2015-05-13 

clientbbwinmembug : 1

 Memory              Used       Total  Percentage

 Physical           1810M       8192M         22%

 Actual                0M       8192M                 0%       [<- SWAP] 

 Swap               1680M      16381M         10%

=======================================================0

Il giorno ven, 10/06/2016 alle 11.16 +0000, zak.beck at accenture.com <mailto:zak.beck at accenture.com>  ha scritto:

Hi Mario

This setting existed before I started maintaining the script.

I believe it is there in case you have been using BBWin – all it does is swap the values reported for swap and virtual. 

My guess is that BBWin reported these a certain way round, the actual correct way round is the opposite, but to maintain compatibility it does it like BBWin – unless you set clientbbwinmemdebug = 0.

If you're migrating from BBWin my guess is you'd want this on so that the client reports the same way. Otherwise, you may want it off.

The other problem with changing it is that I understand some admins have changed the text at the server end to be "correct" for them – so changing it here as well will cause more confusion!

I can add some documentation to the .doc file for what the parameter does.

Zak 

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