Meaning of the /proc/user beancounters Values

The /proc/user_beancounters file is found on virtual private servers which run on the OpenVZ virtualization platform.

Run cat /proc/user_beancounters at any time to check the contents of the contents of the file for entries in the failcnt column when troubleshooting dead processes or daemons on OpenVZ.

Primary Parameters

avnumproc - The average number of processes and threads.
numproc - The maximal number of processes and threads the VE may create.
numtcpsock - The number of TCP sockets (PF_INET family, SOCK_STREAM type). This parameter limits the number of TCP connections and, thus, the number of clients the server application can handle in parallel.
numothersock - The number of sockets other than TCP ones. Local (UNIX-domain) sockets are used for communications inside the system. UDP sockets are used, for example, for Domain Name Service (DNS) queries. UDP and other sockets may also be used in some very specialized applications (SNMP agents and others).
vmguarpages - The memory allocation guarantee, in pages (one page is 4Kb). VE applications are guaranteed to be able to allocate additional memory so long as the amount of memory accounted as privvmpages (see the auxiliary prarameters) does not exceed the configured barrier of the vmguarpages parameter. Above the barrier, additional memory allocation is not guaranteed and may fail in case of overall memory shortage.

kmemsize - The size of unswappable kernel memory allocated for the internal kernel structures for the processes of a particular VE.
tcpsndbuf - The total size of send buffers for TCP sockets, i.e. the ammount of kernel memory allocated for the data sent from an application to a TCP socket, but not acknowledged by the remote side yet.
tcprcvbuf - The total size of receive buffers for TCP sockets, i.e. the ammount of kernel memory allocated for the data received from the remote side, but not read by the local application yet.
othersockbuf - The total size of UNIX-domain socket buffers, UDP, and other datagram protocol send buffers.
dgramrcvbuf - The total size of receive buffers of UDP and other datagram protocols.
oomguarpages - The out-of-memory guarantee, in pages. Any VE process will not be killed even in case of heavy memory shortage if the current memory consumption (including both physical memory and swap) does not reach the oomguarpages barrier.

lockedpages - The memory not allowed to be swapped out (locked with the mlock() system call), in pages.
shmpages - The total size of shared memory (including IPC, shared anonymous mappings, and tmpfs objects) allocated by the process of a particular VE, in pages.
privvmpages - The size of private (or potentially private) memory allocated by an application. The memory that is always shared among different applications is not included in this resource parameter.
numfile - The number of files opened by all VE processes.
numflock - The number of file locks created by all VE processes.
numpty - The number of pseudo-terminals, such as an ssh session, the screen or xterm applications, etc.
numsiginfo - The number of siginfo structures (essentially, this parameter limits the size of the signal delivery queue).
dcachesize - The total size of dentry and inode structures locked in the memory.
physpages - The total size of ram used by the VE processes. This is an accounting-only parameter currently. It shows the usage of RAM by the VE. For the memory pages used by several different VEs (mappings of shared libraries, for example), only the corresponding fraction of a page is charged to each VE. The sum of the physpages usage for all VEs corresponds to the total number of pages used in the system by all the accounted users.
numiptent - The number of IP packet filtering entries.