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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Sun: High kernel usage & very high load averages Post 98132 by rhfrommn on Monday 6th of February 2006 11:21:56 AM
Old 02-06-2006
I strongly suspect this server needs more memory. If you look at the IO Wait it is very small, meaning the I/O isn't causing problems. But the free memory is only a few percent of the total, meaning you are out of memory. The system having to move chunks of data between main memory and swap is what is driving your CPU usage through the roof. If you get more memory, it should solve the problem since that swapping can stop.

One way to verify that is to use sar -g to check how much paging activity is going on. Here is an example from my box.

krypton$ sar -g 5 5

SunOS krypton 5.10 Generic_118822-02 sun4u 02/06/2006

10:18:34 pgout/s ppgout/s pgfree/s pgscan/s %ufs_ipf
10:18:39 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:44 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:49 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:54 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:59 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

Average 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
krypton$

Krypton isn't heavily loaded and has plenty of free memory, so there is no paging or swapping going on at all. If your box shows non-zero numbers here it is out of memory and having to swap. Occasional non-zero is ok as it may just be moving old data out of memory, but if it is constantly a high number it is a problem. My guess is that is what you'll see.
 

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SYSINFO(2)                                                   Linux Programmer's Manual                                                  SYSINFO(2)

NAME
sysinfo - return system information SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/sysinfo.h> int sysinfo(struct sysinfo *info); DESCRIPTION
sysinfo() returns certain statistics on memory and swap usage, as well as the load average. Until Linux 2.3.16, sysinfo() returned information in the following structure: struct sysinfo { long uptime; /* Seconds since boot */ unsigned long loads[3]; /* 1, 5, and 15 minute load averages */ unsigned long totalram; /* Total usable main memory size */ unsigned long freeram; /* Available memory size */ unsigned long sharedram; /* Amount of shared memory */ unsigned long bufferram; /* Memory used by buffers */ unsigned long totalswap; /* Total swap space size */ unsigned long freeswap; /* Swap space still available */ unsigned short procs; /* Number of current processes */ char _f[22]; /* Pads structure to 64 bytes */ }; In the above structure, the sizes of the memory and swap fields are given in bytes. Since Linux 2.3.23 (i386) and Linux 2.3.48 (all architectures) the structure is: struct sysinfo { long uptime; /* Seconds since boot */ unsigned long loads[3]; /* 1, 5, and 15 minute load averages */ unsigned long totalram; /* Total usable main memory size */ unsigned long freeram; /* Available memory size */ unsigned long sharedram; /* Amount of shared memory */ unsigned long bufferram; /* Memory used by buffers */ unsigned long totalswap; /* Total swap space size */ unsigned long freeswap; /* Swap space still available */ unsigned short procs; /* Number of current processes */ unsigned long totalhigh; /* Total high memory size */ unsigned long freehigh; /* Available high memory size */ unsigned int mem_unit; /* Memory unit size in bytes */ char _f[20-2*sizeof(long)-sizeof(int)]; /* Padding to 64 bytes */ }; In the above structure, sizes of the memory and swap fields are given as multiples of mem_unit bytes. RETURN VALUE
On success, sysinfo() returns zero. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the cause of the error. ERRORS
EFAULT info is not a valid address. VERSIONS
sysinfo() first appeared in Linux 0.98.pl6. CONFORMING TO
This function is Linux-specific, and should not be used in programs intended to be portable. NOTES
All of the information provided by this system call is also available via /proc/meminfo and /proc/loadavg. SEE ALSO
proc(5) COLOPHON
This page is part of release 4.15 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. Linux 2017-09-15 SYSINFO(2)
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