Berkeley DB Programmer's Reference: Environment

Berkeley DB Programmer's Reference: Environment

Shared Memory Regions

Each of the Berkeley DB subsystems is described by one or more shared memory regions. These regions live in the environment home directory, and contain all of the shared information, including mutexes, that describes the Berkeley DB environment.

The Berkeley DB architecture does not support placing the shared memory regions on remote filesystems, e.g., the Network File System (NFS) and the Andrew File System (AFS). For this reason, the database home directory must reside in a local filesystem. Databases, log files and temporary files may be placed on remote filesystems, although the application may incur a performance penalty for doing so.