Lack of Memory and Hanging NetWare 386 V3.10a Servers

We have recently been involved in a number of sites where NetWare 386 v3.10a servers were reported as hanging for no apparent reason. The servers would typically hang at times of heavy disk utilisation. Investigation has shown the problem to be caused by a lack of memory in the fileserver.

There is a brief calculation in the NetWare 386 v3.10a manual that allows you to calculate roughly the amount of memory that a NetWare server will need, based on the total disk storage capacity of the server. The calculation is:-

((0.023 * total drive size in MB) / block size in K) + 4 MB of memory

For a 650MB disk, this will give:-

((0.023 * 650) / 4) + 4 = 7.7375MB (7923.2KB)

If the server were an MCA based machine with 8MB memory, with SPLIT RAM set to SHADOW in the Reference Disk Internal Options, the server would have a maximum of 7936KB of memory and would therefore appear to just have enough memory for the configuration.

The above rough calculation does not however take into account the amount of memory used by the various NetWare drivers. For example, the NetWare 386 v3.10a Adaptec SCSI drivers occupy nearly 17KB, the Novell NE/2-32 driver takes just over 9KB, the MONITOR NLM takes just over 166KB, and so on.

We would therefore recommend that for configurations where the rough calculated memory required for the server is within 1MB of the physically installed memory, that extra memory be specified for the server. (For the above example, we would recommend that 12MB of memory be installed rather than 8MB.)

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