Using a database > 256 GB

Q. Is it possible to use a database larger than 256 GB for Flows?

A. Flows 1.2 provides you with the ability to use a database up to 5TB. Please note that you can only use this setting on 64-bit Linux or Mac systems, as Windows will not allow us to use more than 2 GB of RAM.

The procedure for storing more than 256 GB of flows is as follows:

1. Stop the ns2flows daemon.

2. Edit the /ns2flows/netsaw.conf file using one of the following options:

for 1TB (uses an additional 700MB of RAM for indexing):

prefdatabasesize huge

for 2TB (uses an additional 1.6GB of RAM for indexing):

prefdatabasesize veryhuge

for 5TB (uses an additional 3.8GB of RAM for indexing):

prefdatabasesize superhuge

3. Restart the ns2flows daemon. It will automatically start growing the
database files as they roll over.

There are some provisos:

- It will require a lot of RAM. The index for a 5 TB database will be ~4 GBytes. You'll want to have a fairly large amount of RAM as well for caching the recent data.

- Using RAID is advisable, as that will make faster the performance of searches from disk.

As of InterMapper 5.7, InterMapper Flows is integrated into the InterMapper installer, and the paths and filenames have been adjusted.

The netwaw.conf file has been renamed flows.conf and can now be found in InterMapper Settings/Flows.

Paths for InterMapper settings are:

Linux: /var/local/InterMapper_Settings
OS X: /Library/Application Support/InterMapper Settings

Windows does not allow for the larger database settings as noted previously.