Resolution:
Description:
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We start seeing our application frequently throwing the “RV Error: Memory Allocation Failed” error after migrating to AIX from Solarisy.  We did not see this error before the migration. The error is seen every 15 to 30 minutes.  How can I resolve this exception?


Resolution:
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We had customers running applications using TIBCO products on AIX machines throw the “Memory allocation failed” or “Out of memory” errors. After increasing the LDR_CNTRL environment parameter the issues were resolved.

Check the following:

1). ulimit -a

The value for "memory" and "data" are set to "unlimited".

The ulimit command sets or reports user process resource limits.

2). /etc/security/limits file to check the process memory limit:

You should check the current "rss" and "data" size in the above file to see if they are set too low. If they are  you could change "rss" and "data" limit to -1 (unlimited) to see if that solves the problem.

Note: Setting the default limits in the /etc/security/limits file sets system wide limits, not just limits taken on by a user when that user is created.

3). the environment variable LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=n

The default number of data segments is 0 (LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x1000000) which is 256MB.

We suggest that you increase the LDR_CNTRL environment variable on the affected AIX machine.  This can be achieved by executing the following command

"export LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x30000000 &ltapplication>".

You can increase the paging space to LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x30000000
and retest your case.

export LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x30000000 &ltapplication>

The above command will set the process limit size to 1GB.

If you think 1GB is too low, you could try

LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x4000000        ( increase to 1.25 GB)
LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x5000000        ( increase to 1.5 GB)
LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x6000000        ( increase to 1.75 GB)
LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x7000000        ( increase to 2 GB)
LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x8000000        ( increase to 2.25 GB)

Environment:
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This article applies to both 32-bit and 64-bit process on AIX.