02-12-2006
I don't use AIX and I do not understand the commands you used except for vmstat. But I can make a few general comments. It is not clear from your post what effect you would like to have on your system. Running out of swap would be a disaster. You would get messages like "can't fork", "out of memory", etc. Many programs do not handle errors like these very well. The box well might crash or lock up and a reboot would be needed to get things going again. Running out of swap means that you are out of virtual memory. Running out of physical memory is not good but perhaps not a disaster. If vmstat showed you a scan rate of 3000+, you clearly had been out of physical memory for some time. Generally, the box can run in this state, but with a performance impact. If you want to check your swap to ensure that were not close to a disasterous out-of-swap condition, that is a great idea, and I hope some AIX expert comes along who knows those other commands you used. But if you want to address that performance problem, you will need more memory. You may be able to make a modest impact on the severity of the performance problem by distributing your swap across more disks. But adding more memory can make the performance problem go away.
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MD(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual MD(4)
NAME
md -- memory disk
SYNOPSIS
device md
DESCRIPTION
The md driver provides support for four kinds of memory backed virtual disks:
malloc Backing store is allocated using malloc(9). Only one malloc-bucket is used, which means that all md devices with malloc backing
must share the malloc-per-bucket-quota. The exact size of this quota varies, in particular with the amount of RAM in the system.
The exact value can be determined with vmstat(8).
preload A file loaded by loader(8) with type 'md_image' is used for backing store. For backwards compatibility the type 'mfs_root' is also
recognized. If the kernel is created with option MD_ROOT the first preloaded image found will become the root file system.
vnode A regular file is used as backing store. This allows for mounting ISO images without the tedious detour over actual physical media.
swap Backing store is allocated from buffer memory. Pages get pushed out to the swap when the system is under memory pressure, otherwise
they stay in the operating memory. Using swap backing is generally preferable over malloc backing.
For more information, please see mdconfig(8).
EXAMPLES
To create a kernel with a ramdisk or MD file system, your kernel config needs the following options:
options MD_ROOT # MD is a potential root device
options MD_ROOT_SIZE=8192 # 8MB ram disk
makeoptions MFS_IMAGE=/h/foo/ARM-MD
options ROOTDEVNAME="ufs:md0"
The image in /h/foo/ARM-MD will be loaded as the initial image each boot. To create the image to use, please follow the steps to create a
file-backed disk found in the mdconfig(8) man page. Other tools will also create these images, such as NanoBSD.
SEE ALSO
disklabel(8), fdisk(8), loader(8), mdconfig(8), mdmfs(8), newfs(8), vmstat(8)
HISTORY
The md driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0 as a cleaner replacement for the MFS functionality previously used in PicoBSD and in the FreeBSD
installation process.
The md driver did a hostile takeover of the vn(4) driver in FreeBSD 5.0.
AUTHORS
The md driver was written by Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>.
BSD
October 30, 2007 BSD