UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How can you tell how much a Solaris box is swapping? At what point do page in and page out become a problem? Here is a vmstat output.
> vmstat
procs memory page disk faults cpu
r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr m0 m1 m2 m3 in sy cs us sy id
0 10 0 98584 2160 11 560 856 20 1157 0 210 2 280 38 0 1662 8342 1496 27 4 69

I looked at your vmstat's output and you can see that your b colum is very high (10). This colum aplies to process (or threads in AIX) that are blocked for resources (I/O, paging, and so forth). That means that you probably is running out of memory. But sometimes you do not have low resources on memory but you experience that. In that case you may have too intensive processes and it is causing bottlenecks in your system. About your memory, you can issue "swap -l " and see if your paging usage is too high. Another thing that you must see is if anyone is using your /tmp tmpfs. Once /tmp is an extension of memory, that can cause you problems. It's very important to realize that you must see not only pi and po colums, but free, swap, r, b, w colums to diagnose swapping problems.

Any questions, or suggestions, tell me

HTT