HELP - memory usage on Solaris : ps -efl and top Post: 302454740

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Operating Systems Solaris HELP - memory usage on Solaris : ps -efl and top Post 302454740 by newbie_01 on Monday 20th of September 2010 01:19:35 AM

09-20-2010

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by jlliagre

"top" isn't part of the OS. It is known to report confusing data as it doesn't use always the same terminology as Solaris does. Better to avoid it and use prstat, vmstat, "swap -s" and the likes.

Hi,

I totally agreed with what you noted so I will stick to the known reliable generic commands of vmstat, prstat etc. I got some more questions below, if you don't mind ... Smilie

Quote:

There is hopefully no minimum memory usage kernel tuning per process. I would guess this is simply due to shared memory accounted to each process.
What problem do you want to troubleshoot ? You tell there is no swapping reported so IMHO nothing to fix.
You have plenty of available memory (most of the ZFS file data is available to applications should they need it) and anyway, unused memory is wasted memory.

Again, totally agreed, no swapping = no problem = nothing to fix. And you are right, unused memory is wasted memory, it's like why worry about 90% CPU used as long as it is a valid not for aethestic reason, i.e. looks good/bad on the graph Smilie

- In saying that, what am mainly wanting to achieve I suppose is whether the reported memory usage from ps -efl column is correct or not. If I sum up the values under the SZ column and the total is less than the total RAM on the server, does that mean, swapping is not happening. Will there be a case where the sum of the SZ column is greater than the total RAM on the server in which case, that should mean swapping is happening? BTW, is it possible to get total memory usage using the ps command ... Smilie

... am currently doing this via an awk script.

- Smilie

You said "You have plenty of available memory (most of the ZFS file data is available to applications should they need it)", how are you able to tell that it is available or unavailable? Am presuming you are getting this info from the "echo ::memstat | mdb -k". Doesn't the output from that mean used/allocated memory by "ZFS File Data" rather than whether it is available/unnavailable memory or is that a wrong assumption? Can you please explain further?

- The "no swapping" conclusion is from the top command so without using top, my vmstat output is as below, po is zero (0) so that confirms that swapping is not happening.

vmstat output:

Code:

 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr vc vc vc --   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0 970584 531248 244 768 145 0 0  0  0  0  0  2  0 1181 2719 1424  2  2 96
 0 0 0 967432 526872 979 1311 13 0 0  0  0 18  0  2  0 1025 5305 1159  7  7 86
 0 0 0 968808 529360 125 470 16 0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  772 2869 1076  1  3 96
 0 0 0 969936 530528 32 163  2  0  0  0  0  0  0 23  0  803  820  722  0  1 98
 0 0 0 968120 530472 32 163 24  0  0  0  0  0  0  2  0  750  923  628  0  1 98
 0 0 0 970072 530520 47 217  5  0  0  0  0  0  0  4  0  900 1585  914  1  1 97
 0 0 0 970072 530480 32 163 10  0  0  0  0  4  0  2  0  817  897  746  1  1 98
 0 0 0 970072 530424 45 245  2  0  0  0  0  4  0  3  0  786 1183  696  1  1 98
 0 0 0 970072 530392 33 163 16  0  0  0  0  0  0 31  0  987 1050 1001  1  1 98
 0 0 0 969968 530104 29 127  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  3  0  660  788  548  1  1 98
 0 0 0 969944 530072 94 259  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  685 1983  565  1  2 97
 0 0 0 969504 529392 565 1207 3 0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  857 5262 1115  5  3 92
 0 0 0 969624 529416 268 555 3  0  0  0  0  3  0  2  0  934 2734 1063  2  2 96
 0 0 0 965576 524256 1635 3352 37 0 0 0  0  0  0  2  0 1312 13458 2363 15 12 73

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