Crazy default kern.maxusers?

[Borja Marcos]

Hi :)

I am setting an Elasticsearch cluster using FreeBSD 12-STABLE. The servers have 64 GB of memory and I am running ZFS. 

I was puzzled when despite having limited vfs.zfs.arc_max to 32 GB and assigning a 16 GB heap (locked) to Elasticsearch,
and with around 10 GB of free memory, I saw the system hitting swap and actively paging in and out. 

Should it happen? 

Checking sysctl values I noticed that kern.maxusers was 4429!

Is this sane? I have decreased it to 32 on boot.loader.conf and I am checking wether it behaves the same.

Thanks!




Borja.