SMAT Maximum File Size

[Bob Moriarty]

I’ve searched the clovertech forum and did not find anything definitive regarding a maximum SMAT file size.

We are in the process of going from 5.8.4 to 6.1.1 on AIX 6.1.

On 5.8.4 the max file size for our hci account is 1 GB.

For various reasons it would be nice to have a larger max file size for SMATs so I’ve been experimenting using an unlimited file size setting for the hci account on the 6.1.1 system.

There appears to be a limit with the SMAT viewer around 2 GB. Messages in the first 2/3’s of a 3 GB SMAT file can be displayed and selected. But when moving the slider (beneath the message viewer window) to display a message that’s beyond ~2 GB, SMAT complains:

“An error occurred while attempting to retrieve a message.” With the Exception Information stating “for input string “2358597759”” (value changes with slider placement).

I’m guessing the apparent 2 GB limit is related to Cloverleaf’s 32-bit-ness.

Thanks in advance

Topic

[Russ Ross]

Personally I would not want a SMAT file to even be 1GB and we cycle our SMAT every 3 hours to keep message chunks tolerable and manageable.

Okay but if I was determined to have a SMAT file bigger than 2GBs I would increase it in the /etc/security/limits file like you already did but that only takes care of UNIX side of the equation.

Plus I need to be sure my UNIX os is running at 64-bit and not 32-bit as well as the cloverleaf version I installed.

If any piece is at 32-bit that might prevent going above 2GB.

Next when running the SMAT tool from the IDE that is on Windows so there could be a restriction at that point if say running Win7 (32-bit).

If the actual SMAT file on the UNIX server is larger than 2GB that might indicate if the OS is 64-bit, there is a way to check but not able to remember how off the top of my head, ask a system admin or goolge.

Then launche the GUI/IDE from the back end so it is running on the AIX server and try and run SMAT tool from their to see if it works.

To do this requires an x-window manager (we use Exceed and winx-32) with an xterm launched and logged in to your cloverleaf environment, then at the xterm prompt type

hciaccess&

If able to load and scroll the entire SMAT while running completely on the back end then I suspect the PC is the limiting factor, and might be running at 32-bit.

Even though I would not imagine wanting to do this, always curious were the limits are.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Rob Abbott]

The engine in 5.8 and above uses 64-bit addressing for SMAT and recovery/error databases, so the max file size is well above 2GB.

However, the GUI is limited to 32-bit addressing so it can only access up to 2GB of data in a smat file.

The SMAT database has a limit of about 1TB for both engine and GUI.

We’ll get the documentation updated in a future release to reflect this.  thanks!

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Author]

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