Memory is the most important consideration when you are configuring Adaptive Server. Memory is consumed by various configuration parameters, procedure cache and data caches. Setting the values of the various configuration parameters and the caches correctly is critical to good system performance.
The total memory allocated during boot-time is the sum of memory required for all the configuration needs of Adaptive Server. This value can be obtained from the read-only configuration parameter 'total logical memory'. This value is calculated by Adaptive Server. The configuration parameter 'max memory' must be greater than or equal to 'total logical memory'. 'max memory' indicates the amount of memory you will allow for Adaptive Server needs.
During boot-time, by default, Adaptive Server allocates memory based on the value of 'total logical memory'. However, if the configuration parameter 'allocate max shared memory' has been set, then the memory allocated will be based on the value of 'max memory'. The configuration parameter 'allocate max shared memory' will enable a system administrator to allocate, the maximum memory that is allowed to be used by Adaptive Server, during boot-time.
The key points for memory configuration are:
The system administrator should determine the size of shared memory available to Adaptive Server and set 'max memory' to this value.
The configuration parameter 'allocate max shared memory' can be turned on during boot-time and run-time to allocate all the shared memory up to 'max memory' with the least number of shared memory segments. Large number of shared memory segments has the disadvantage of some performance degradation on certain platforms. Please check your operating system documentation to determine the optimal number of shared memory segments. Note that once a shared memory segment is allocated, it cannot be released until the next server reboot.
Configure the different configuration parameters, if the defaults are not sufficient.
Now the difference between 'max memory' and 'total logical memory' is additional memory available for procedure, data caches or for other configuration parameters.
The amount of memory to be allocated by Adaptive Server during boot-time, is determined by either 'total logical memory' or 'max memory'. If this value too high:
Adaptive Server may not start, if the physical resources on your machine does is not sufficient.
If it does start, the operating system page fault rates may rise significantly and the operating system may need to re configured to compensate.
The System Administration Guide provides a thorough discussion of:
How to configure the total amount of memory used by Adaptive Server
Configurable parameters that use memory, which affects the amount of memory left for processing queries
Handling wider character literals requires Adaptive Server to allocate memory for string user data. Also, rather than statically allocating buffers of the maximum possible size, Adaptive Server allocates memory dynamically. That is, it allocates memory for local buffers as it needs it, always allocating the maximum size for these buffers, even if large buffers are unnecessary. These memory management requests may cause Adaptive Server to have a marginal loss in performance when handling wide-character data.
If you require Adaptive Server to handle more than 1000 columns from a single table, or process over 10000 arguments to stored procedures, the server must set up and allocate memory for various internal data structures for these objects. An increase in the number of small tasks that are performed repeatedly may cause performance degradation for queries that deal with larger numbers of such items. This performance hit increases as the number of columns and stored procedure arguments increases.
Memory that is allocated dynamically (as opposed to rebooting Adaptive Server to allocate the memory) slightly degrades the server’s performance.
When Adaptive Server uses larger logical page sizes, all disk I/Os are done in terms of the larger logical page sizes. For example, if Adaptive Server uses an 8K logical page size, it retrieves data from the disk in 8K blocks. This should result in an increased I/O throughput, although the amount of throughput is eventually limited by the controller’s I/O bandwidth.
What remains after all other memory needs have been met is available for the procedure cache and the data cache. Figure 15-1 shows how memory is divided.
Figure 15-1: How Adaptive Server uses memory
