Hi Thanks for the responses:

yes we have checked various subsystems during the issues - we have nmon graphs that show high wait times and also have alerting that proved wait times to be above 60 from the vmstat command.

I ran svmon:

--> svmon -G -i 2

size inuse free pin virtual
memory 3145689 3087096 58593 182176 858018
pg space 2785280 428652

work pers clnt
pin 182158 0 0
in use 913993 2173103 0


also topas and noticed lots of page faults due to paging in and out.

hdisk1 and 0 are heavily utilised pretty much all day as well as other system disks but I tend not to believe everything in topas.

We run ps awux > /tmp/monitoring.date.

this file is updated every 15 minutes and I find the following which apperently is normal system calls: (these are the top procs in the file every 15 mins)

root 2064 8.5 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60881:40 kproc
root 1806 8.5 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60821:30 kproc
root 1548 8.5 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60818:49 kproc
root 1290 8.5 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60703:20 kproc
root 2322 8.5 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60685:25 kproc
root 1032 8.5 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60554:57 kproc
root 774 8.4 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 60152:51 kproc
root 516 8.1 0.0 12 9008 - A 24 Feb 57866:27 kproc
root 3096 0.0 0.0 64 9052 - A 24 Feb 198:45 kproc
root 2580 0.0 0.0 12 9004 - A 24 Feb 139:47 kproc
root 2838 0.0 0.0 16 9012 - A 24 Feb 1:41 kproc
root 3354 0.0 0.0 16 9012 - A 24 Feb 1:10 kproc
root 32510 0.0 0.0 16 9012 - A 24 Feb 0:03 kproc
root 30446 0.0 0.0 16 9012 - A 24 Feb 0:02 kproc
root 582168 0.0 0.0 16 9004 - A 28 Feb 0:00 kproc
root 25284 0.0 0.0 16 9004 - A 24 Feb 0:00 kproc
root 25542 0.0 0.0 16 9004 - A 24 Feb 0:00 kproc
root 25800 0.0 0.0 16 9004 - A 24 Feb 0:00 kproc
root 25026 0.0 0.0 16 9004 - A 24 Feb 0:00 kproc


when I grep out defunct:

retail ps auwx Monitor on Mon 24 Apr 18:15:00 2006
rt07mszw 1228822 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt05hdzw 925824 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0v9rzm 1064108 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0a5jzm 1990444 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt07mszw 1772756 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt07mszw 1733018 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt06ggxp 1731806 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 246550 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt07mszw 781804 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt08cazm 807862 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 732496 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 671516 Z 0:00 <defunct>
retail ps auwx Monitor on Mon 24 Apr 18:30:01 2006
rt050azb 1280306 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 1502640 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0d5rws 1481808 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0j2czb 1410630 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0o5ayb 1410304 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0r5mza 1030858 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0o5ayb 1014478 Z 0:00 <defunct>
root 1914084 Z 0:00 <defunct>
root 1966324 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt095req 1948512 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt01mszm 1944508 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0d5rws 1682574 Z 0:00 <defunct>
root 455384 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 232872 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 732496 Z 0:00 <defunct>
informix 734412 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt05adyk 551914 Z 0:00 <defunct>
rt0a2gzt 654196 Z 0:00 <defunct>


now these do disapear and repear with different PIDS.

any ideas?

Thanks