[hobbit] Startup problem on FreeBSD

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 08:48:40PM +0200, Arnoud Post wrote:
> I have just installed version 4.0.4 for the first time. I'm running FreeBSD 
> 5.3 on Intel.
> 2005-05-29 20:25:14 Task hobbitd started with PID 43892
> 2005-05-29 20:25:14 Setting up hobbitd channels
> 2005-05-29 20:25:14 Could not get sem: No space left on device
> 2005-05-29 20:25:14 Cannot setup status channel
> 2005-05-29 20:25:14 Task hobbitd terminated, status 1

That's a first - I've never seen this error before.

The problem is with one of the FreeBSD kernel parameters
controlling the number of "semaphores" available on this system.
Hobbit uses 6 sets of semaphores, each set contains 3 semaphores,
so a total of 18 semaphores.

Try running the command "sysctl -a | grep kern.ipc.sem" to check what 
the kernel limits are for semaphores. The interesting values are
the "kern.ipc.semmni" (the number of semaphore sets available),
and "kern.ipc.semmns" (the total number of semaphores). On my
FreeBSD 4.10 box, those are set at 10 and 60, respectively - and
as expected Hobbit runs fine with that. But this is a global ressource, 
so there may be other applications on your box that use semaphores 
("ipcs -s -a" as root will show you that).

I don't know enough about FreeBSD to help you with changing these
parameters - Google'ing a bit for "FreeBSD+kern.ipc.semmni" indicates
that this also needs tuning if you run PostgreSQL.


Regards,
Henrik