Most of us fairly familiar with errno -28 (No space left on device) during Assertion Failure (AF), while Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) generates diagnostics data (AF file and shared memory dump). Diagnostics data are very critical to determine the root cause of failure. AF files are generally not too big, where as shared memory dumps often huge in size, almost same as the total memory size used by the IDS instance. The lack of disk space can cause partially dump of shared memory file, which add very little or no value to diagnose the failure.

In large IDS systems, the amount of space required to dump the shared memory is excessive because of gigantic sizes of the resident segment. Most of it contains is BUFFERPOOL information. Large size of the shared memory dump file not only create space issue, it difficult also for technical support to extract useful information in a timely manner.

The IDS version 11.50 provides some flexibility to control how much memory is written to a dump file. We can exclude the buffer pool information from resident segment to significantly reduce the shared memory dump file size. Configuration parameter DUMPSHMEM and onstat both provide some new options to control the shared memory dump size.

Use the DUMPSHMEM configuration parameter to automatically create a dump file during AF. Set DUMPSHMEM to 2 to create a shared memory dump that excludes the buffer pool. You can dynamically change the value of DUMPSHMEM with onmode -wm and onmode -wf. The DUMPSHMEM can take following values:

        0 -  Do not dump shared memory during AF
        1 -  Dump full shared memory (default)
        2 -  Dump shared memory without bufferpool (new option)

The 'onstat -o' command also allows to dump shared memory file on-demand. Use the new ‘nobuffs’ options with 'onstat -o' to generate shared memory dump without bufferpool. If you use 'onstat -o' without 'nobuffs' option, the DUMPSHMEM configuration parameter controls the content of shared memory file. The 0 or 1 configuration value will generate full shared memory dump file and 2 exclude buffer pool information.

All oncheck options works on the shared memory dump file without buffer pool, except options that access buffer information e.g. -b, -B, -P.

Typically onstat shows segments as “FACADE” while working with full shared memory, where as shared memory without buffer pool shows as "FAÇADE NOBUFFERS".