
High-process-count support added to master - tiffanyh
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2017-August/313552.html
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le-mark
My question is: why am I paying cloud providers for virtual machines with some
imaginary virtual cpu count (or dynos or whatever) when I could be paying for
M process running my server executable (capped at N threads per process)? Why
can't I just write a server, bundle up the exe and assets, and run it
somewhere? Why do I have to futz about with admining, patching, and hardening
the OS when that's not what I care about?

Edit, to clarify, it just seems like an os with the capability to host a large
number of user processes as here would really allow an order of magnitude
reduction in hosting cost. Ie if a machine can host 1,000,000 paying accounts
vs 10 vps/containered apps.

~~~
tiffanyh
Not to sound cheeky but it sounds like you want to pay for timeshare on a
mainframe.

(and I agree, it'd actually be nice if cloud providers framed cost based on
processes count not vCPUs. Heroku kind of does that with their concept of
"dynos")

~~~
digi_owl
Given the incessant push towards treating the web as a front end for "cloud
apps", timeshare is back baby. Only that now the terminal is replaced with the
web browser.

------
tiffanyh

      xeon126# uptime
     1:42PM  up 9 mins, 3 users, load averages: 890407.00, 549381.40, 254199.55
    

Seeing load averages of ~900,000 blows my mind.

~~~
mritun
> Seeing load averages of ~900,000 blows my mind.

More impressive is that you can run "uptime" and it actually responds with an
output in reasonable amount of time with said 6-digit load-average.

------
theandrewbailey
Just make sure that your process destruction doesn't involve a lock in kernel
space. 900,000 threads waiting for a lock... yikes!

[https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-
and...](https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant-
move-my-mouse/)

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lallysingh
6 digit PIDs? These aren't actually stored in decimal, right?

~~~
jrbancel
No, but they are constrained to be less than or equal to 999,999.

See
[http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/586c43085f...](http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/586c43085fc900273732f99de6c9ef43f73ded76:/sys/sys/proc.h#l445)

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justin66
> With the commits made today, master can support at least 900,000 processes
> with just a kern.maxproc setting in /boot/loader.conf, assuming the machine
> has the memory to handle it.

They are just four bits away from hitting a really big number.

