tigerbeetle TigerBeetle crashes on startup for lower RAM systems

Hello,

I was trying out TigerBeetle quick start guide on a server with 2 GB of RAM.

Instead of complaining that the available RAM is insufficient, the program tries to carry on and ultimately gets killed by OOM.

Took me a while to debug that it is indeed the OOM which is causing this.

The issue went away once I added 4 GBs of swap.

I believe the following will improve the first-time trial experience to your potential users:

For quickly trying out the DB, loosen the RAM requirements
If (1) is not possible, then handle the situation gracefully on startup, provide a helpful message to the user on what they can do (swap or increase ram)
Highlight the minimum RAM requirement in the quick start guide

Jun 28 '24 05:06 shrsv

(1) is already complete and will be part of the next release: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/issues/1884

Jun 28 '24 13:06 sentientwaffle

Sounds great - looking forward to the release @sentientwaffle

Jun 28 '24 14:06 shrsv

@dineshtrivedi I thought you might be interested in this financial database 👍🏾

Jun 30 '24 16:06 shailen-naidoo

From the description of the op, I take it that tigerbeetle didn't fail immediately on startup, presumably because of overcommit on linux. Since tigerbeetle knows exactly how much memory it will ever need, I wonder if it can defeat overcommit (maybe with the MAP_POPULATE mmap flag) and fail in a nicer way. It might also make sense to mlock all the memory into RAM.

Jul 10 '24 16:07 brson