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- Berkeley DB Reference Guide:
- Environment
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Shared memory regions
Each of the Berkeley DB subsystems within an environment is described by one or
more regions. The regions contain all of the per-process and per-thread
shared information, including mutexes, that comprise a Berkeley DB environment.
These regions are created in one of three areas, depending on the flags
specified to the DB_ENV->open function:
- If the DB_PRIVATE flag is specified to DB_ENV->open,
regions are created in per-process heap memory; that is, memory returned
by malloc(3). In this case, the Berkeley DB environment may only
be accessed by a single process, although that process may be
multithreaded.
- If the DB_SYSTEM_MEM flag is specified to DB_ENV->open,
regions are created in system memory. When regions are created in system
memory, the Berkeley DB environment may be accessed by both multiple processes
and multiple threads within processes.
The system memory used by Berkeley DB is potentially useful past the lifetime
of any particular process. Therefore, additional cleanup may be
necessary after an application fails because there may be no way for
Berkeley DB to ensure that system resources backing the shared memory regions
are returned to the system.
The system memory that is used is architecture-dependent. For example,
on systems supporting X/Open-style shared memory interfaces, such as
UNIX systems, the shmget(2) and related System V IPC
interfaces are used. Additionally, VxWorks systems use system memory.
In these cases, an initial segment ID must be specified by the
application to ensure that applications do not overwrite each other's
database environments, so that the number of segments created does not
grow without bounds. See the DB_ENV->set_shm_key method for more
information.
On Windows platforms, the use of the DB_SYSTEM_MEM flag is
problematic because the operating system uses reference counting to
clean up shared objects in the paging file automatically. See
Windows Notes for more
information.
- If no memory-related flags are specified to DB_ENV->open, memory
backed by the filesystem is used to store the regions. On UNIX systems,
the Berkeley DB library will use the POSIX mmap interface. If mmap is not
available, the UNIX shmget interfaces will be used, assuming they are
available.
Any files created in the filesystem to back the regions are created in
the environment home directory specified to the DB_ENV->open call.
These files are named __db.### (for example, __db.001, __db.002 and
so on). When region files are backed by the filesystem, one file per
region is created. When region files are backed by system memory, a
single file will still be created because there must be a well-known
name in the filesystem so that multiple processes can locate the system
shared memory that is being used by the environment.
Statistics about the shared memory regions in the environment can be
displayed using the -e option to the db_stat utility.
Copyright Sleepycat Software
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