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Full Discussion: High memory usage in AIX 5.1
Operating Systems AIX High memory usage in AIX 5.1 Post 302167516 by bakunin on Thursday 14th of February 2008 04:31:14 PM
Old 02-14-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by jayakumarrt
Thanks for the reply.One thing i am wondering.Sometime back the server was having 4GB ram and recently upgraded to 8 GB.Before upgrading from 4 to 8 GB RAM it was showing 99% memory usage & after upgradation also the same case..

Can anybody throw light on this. ?
If you have the output of "vmstat" from before the upgrade ready have a look at it: i bet you will see a lot of swapping going on and probably now you won't see any (or at least much less than before). The same is perhaps true for the output of "lsps -a", which tells you about the utilization of the swapspaces: perhaps the numbers decreased steeply after upgrading the RAM.

UNIX tries to use the RAM given to it as efficiently as possible: First all the processes started get the memory they need. Some memory is set aside for network buffers, file cache, etc. If still memory is available these buffers will increase in size - which buffers increases how much depends on how the machine is used: more disk-I/O, more network traffic, etc.. The administrator can tune the kernel built-in heuristics with the tools vmo (virtual memory options), schedo (scheduler options), no (network options) and ioo (I/O-options). See the manpages of these tools and the documentation of /etc/tunables for more information.

If no memory is available after satisfying the started processes demands paging occurs: memory pages are taken from the "computational memory" (memory occupied by programs by swapping them out to the paging space) or from the "file memory" (the file cache). When and how much is taken from what can also be tuned, see the "maxperm" and "minperm" parameters in "vmo".

Of course i cannot give you a detailed documentation of the AIX kernel here: what i wrote above are only glimpses and pretty unsorted ones. If you are interested in the details there are two IBM classes (AIX System Administration III: Performance Tuning; AIX Kernel Internals; each 5 days). There are also Redbooks (IBM Redbooks | AIX 5L Practical Performance Tools and Tuning Guide, IBM Redbooks | AIX 5L Performance Tools Handbook, IBM Redbooks | Database Performance Tuning on AIX) available, read them for further details.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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VMSTAT(1)						      General Commands Manual							 VMSTAT(1)

NAME
vmstat - report virtual memory statistics SYNOPSIS
vmstat [ -fsi ] [ drives ] [ interval [ count ] ] DESCRIPTION
Vmstat delves into the system and normally reports certain statistics kept about process, virtual memory, disk, trap and cpu activity. If given a -f argument, it instead reports on the number of forks and vforks since system startup and the number of pages of virtual memory involved in each kind of fork. If given a -s argument, it instead prints the contents of the sum structure, giving the total number of several kinds of paging related events which have occurred since boot. If given a -i argument, it instead reports on the number of inter- rupts taken by each device since system startup. If none of these options are given, vmstat will report in the first line a summary of the virtual memory activity since the system has been booted. If interval is specified, then successive lines are summaries over the last interval seconds. ``vmstat 5'' will print what the system is doing every five seconds; this is a good choice of printing interval since this is how often some of the statistics are sampled in the system; others vary every second, running the output for a while will make it apparent which are recomputed every second. If a count is given, the statistics are repeated count times. The format fields are: Procs: information about numbers of processes in various states. r in run queue b blocked for resources (i/o, paging, etc.) w runnable or short sleeper (< 20 secs) but swapped Memory: information about the usage of virtual and real memory. Virtual pages are considered active if they belong to processes which are running or have run in the last 20 seconds. A ``page'' here is 1024 bytes. avm active virtual pages fre size of the free list Page: information about page faults and paging activity. These are averaged each five seconds, and given in units per second. re page reclaims (simulating reference bits) at pages attached (found in free list) pi pages paged in po pages paged out fr pages freed per second de anticipated short term memory shortfall sr pages scanned by clock algorithm, per-second up/hp/rk/ra: Disk operations per second (this field is system dependent). Typically paging will be split across several of the available drives. The number under each of these is the unit number. Faults: trap/interrupt rate averages per second over last 5 seconds. in (non clock) device interrupts per second sy system calls per second cs cpu context switch rate (switches/sec) Cpu: breakdown of percentage usage of CPU time us user time for normal and low priority processes sy system time id cpu idle If more than 4 disk drives are configured in the system, vmstat displays only the first 4 drives, with priority given to Massbus disk drives (i.e. if both Unibus and Massbus drives are present and the total number of drives exceeds 4, then some number of Unibus drives will not be displayed in favor of the Massbus drives). To force vmstat to display specific drives, their names may be supplied on the command line. FILES
/dev/kmem, /vmunix SEE ALSO
systat(1), iostat(1) The sections starting with ``Interpreting system activity'' in Installing and Operating 4.2bsd. 4th Berkeley Distribution March 15, 1986 VMSTAT(1)
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