Kurt Schreiner wrote:
> But what seems to be going on is allocating unreasonable amounts of
> system mem as processes start groveling a large directory hierarchies
> like rsync or cvs do?!

If the vnode is in cache, the associated file data may be cached too,
depending on some other system settings.
This means that besides the memory needed to hold vnode structures,
additional memory is used.

What is you vm.filemax setting? I have settings like this:

> sysctl vm
vm.loadavg: 7.39 6.77 6.46
vm.nkmempages = 32768
vm.anonmin = 10
vm.execmin = 5
vm.filemin = 10
vm.maxslp = 20
vm.uspace = 16384
vm.anonmax = 80
vm.execmax = 30
vm.filemax = 50

I guess that setting vm.filemax to lower value that what
you currently have might help you.

> > Perhaps we could change the code to do some sanity checks
> > for value of kern.maxvnodes.
> That would save others the "crashing experience" or at least a
> sluggish system.

Yep. Perhaps send-pr the problem so that someone would address
this later?

Jaromir 
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>            http://www.NetBSD.cz/
-=- We should be mindful of the potential goal, but as the Buddhist -=-
-=- masters say, ``You may notice during meditation that you        -=-
-=- sometimes levitate or glow.   Do not let this distract you.''   -=-