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Originally Posted by
javanoob
Back to the reason on the post
- I have 3GB of swap disk used (in swap -l)
- I have 10GB+ of free physical RAM
- I have 0 scanrate and vmstat available swap = 37GB
Since i am 10G of physical ram and 0 SR - i am not short on ram
Since i have 37GB of virtual swap available - i am not short on virtual swap
What could have contributed to the 3GB swap disk ?
Three gigabytes of memory were used (i.e. read/written) sometime in the past by some process(es). They have not been accessed for a while so the kernel decided to put the data on disk, to keep the free RAM high.
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Could it be at some point of time, i am running low on physical ram and swap/paging need to be done ?
You need not to starve on RAM for paging to occur.
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When does physical space used in swapdisk be release ?
When the processes owning it will die.
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It is gradually increasing (slow.. but like 5-10MB more of swapdisk used per week) - that is the worrying part.
That might be just some optimization done by the kernel.
There might be a memory leak in a process, 10 MB per week is not among the fiercest ones.
There might be a growing file in /tmp or any tmpfs based file system. The storage area of tmpfs is virtual memory (not any process virtual memory but the OS virtual memory, i.e. RAM + SWAP as Bakunin wrote).
Note also the free memory might be actually used by the kernel, which isn't constrained by process virtual memory rules.
Solaris uses free memory as UFS and NFS cache, so this free memory contains actual data, but it is nevertheless reported as free by vmstat and similar commands, because it is immediately available for processes allocations.