Swap space (almost) full

 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Homework and Emergencies Emergency UNIX and Linux Support Swap space (almost) full
# 1  
Old 02-28-2015
Swap space (almost) full

Hello,
This is RHEL 5.7. swap is almost full, but I am not sure, what to release and how to release space. This is production server so I would like to try all possible options before reboot.
Code:
[root@tudcol10 ~]# top
top - 00:18:26 up 327 days,  7:01,  3 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.21, 0.18
Tasks: 782 total,   1 running, 781 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.1%us,  0.1%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.8%id,  0.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  49322952k total, 35302516k used, 14020436k free,  1986316k buffers
Swap: 52428116k total, 52424792k used,     3324k free,  3224040k cached

[root@tudcol10 ~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         48166      34480      13686          0       1941       3148
-/+ buffers/cache:      29390      18776
Swap:        51199      51196          3
[root@tudcol10 ~]# pidof memcached

[root@tudcol10 ~]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:     49322952 kB
MemFree:      14006976 kB
Buffers:       1988464 kB
Cached:        3224596 kB
SwapCached:     524352 kB
Active:       29330340 kB
Inactive:      4358960 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:     49322952 kB
LowFree:      14006976 kB
SwapTotal:    52428116 kB
SwapFree:         3324 kB
Dirty:            6848 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:    27986200 kB
Mapped:         280616 kB
Slab:          1237248 kB
PageTables:     251032 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:  77089592 kB
Committed_AS: 113543976 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:    301576 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359435251 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB
[root@tudcol10 ~]#

# 2  
Old 02-28-2015
Check vmstat looking at PI column if actual swapping is occurring at a certain moment.

If not, you are fine at this moment (probably not due to free memory available on the machine from your post)

What should worry you that sometime in past swapping occurred and was used by a process(es) which is no longer running.

You might want to consider putting vmstat in cron to monitor your machine to pinpoint the time when swapping occurs, then identify what is being ran to cause such high memory usage.
# 3  
Old 02-28-2015
As of now, current issue is, we are installing a software which requires 1 GB of free swap space. Due to less space, that is failing. I was checking if I can make it work without adding more swap space. Here is vmstat output. Does it point to something ?
Code:
[root@tudcol10 ~]# vmstat 2 10
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu------
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 0  0 52424664 13507380 2032568 3311216    0    0    19    14    0    0  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0 52424664 13507704 2032584 3311336    0    0     0    38 1290 3973  0  0 100  0  0
 0  1 52424664 13508008 2032604 3311320    0    0     0   228 1185 3972  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0 52424664 13508116 2032688 3311248    0    0     0   352 1150 4560  0  0 100  0  0
 2  0 52424664 13507632 2032696 3311348    0    0     0    74 1588 4365  0  0 99  0  0
 0  0 52424664 13507352 2032708 3311336    0    0     0   288 1134 3240  0  0 99  0  0
 0  0 52424664 13507384 2032732 3311320    0    0     0    70 1268 3880  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0 52424664 13507844 2032744 3311344    0    0     0   268 1205 3903  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0 52424664 13508116 2032752 3311364    0    0     0    60 1053 3531  0  0 100  0  0
 1  0 52424664 13508240 2032764 3311364    0    0     0    82 1320 3226  0  0 100  0  0
[root@tudcol10 ~]#

# 4  
Old 02-28-2015
You need to identify what process(es) are currently using swap space. Here is one popular method:
Code:
for file in /proc/*/status 
do 
     awk '/VmSwap|Name/ {printf $2 " " $3} END { print ""}' $file
done | sort -k 2 -n -r

# 5  
Old 02-28-2015
Are you running oracle? The SGA is created then swap of the same size is allocated. There is never any swapping activity once the SGA's are created. To allow other processes and oracle to get what they need, we created 500GB of swap - on a machine with 256 GB memory. Many applications do this. The only workaround is to add swap because of badly behaved processes. In this particular scenario.
# 6  
Old 02-28-2015
This is OHS and httpd server. Here is output of script given by fpmurphy, I have grepped top processes
Code:
[root@tudcol10  ~]# /tmp/swap_check.sh | wc -l
794
[root@tudcol10  ~]#
[root@tudcol10  ~]# /tmp/swap_check.sh | grep httpd.worker | wc -l
142
[root@tudcol10  ~]# /tmp/swap_check.sh | grep odl_rotatelogs | wc -l
105
[root@tudcol10  ~]# /tmp/swap_check.sh | grep opmn | wc -l
76
[root@tudcol10  ~]#

# 7  
Old 03-01-2015
Display the top 10 memory consumers:
Code:
ps -e -o vsz,rss,comm | { read x; echo "$x"; sort -k2n | tail; }

Login or Register to Ask a Question

Previous Thread | Next Thread

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Solaris

File system full, swap

hi all I am having a t5240 server in that zone is there in /var/adm/messages i am getting the following warning WARNING: /zoneroot/zonename-zone/root/tmp: File system full, swap space limit exceeded if a swap is getting full what can i do. Please use code tags next time for your... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: nikhil kasar
2 Replies

2. Solaris

Solaris full /tmp - du and df different swap NOT filled

Hello all, The issue is # df -h /tmp Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on swap 4.0G 4.0G 8.7M 100% /tmp # du -sh /tmp/ 87M /tmp By now you probably will say that this is open file destriptor issue. Well no, nothing... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: click
2 Replies

3. Solaris

Swap space

Dear All, I have a swap space of 16G available in Sol 10. I have allocated it as a seperate file system. But when the RAM Is full used , the system gets rebooted and the swap is not being used,. Any reasons for this. Rgds Rj (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: jegaraman
5 Replies

4. Linux

How to reclaim the space which i used to increse the swap space on Xen,

Hi, i have done a blunder here, i increased the swap space on Xen5.6 server machine using below steps :- 1056 dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/myswapfile bs=1M count=1024 1057 ls -l /root/myswapfile 1058 chmod 600 /root/myswapfile 1059 mkswap /root/myswapfile 1060 swapon /root/myswapfile ... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: apm
1 Replies

5. Linux

swap space

Hi, I want to know how can i free the swap space if it is completely full, 0 mb remaining, (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: manoj.solaris
1 Replies

6. Solaris

/tmp: File system full, swap space limit exceeded

Can you help. My server sunning solaris 9 on x86 platform pretty much hung for a few hours... I could not use telnet or ssh to the box - it kept refusing connection. A few hours later - I was able to log in again. The server has not rebooted but here are the first errors in the messages log... (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: frustrated1
5 Replies

7. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Swap space used???

Plz I need to know how much swap mem free and used i have. I'm using Compaq Tru64 UNIX V5.1A (rev 1885) Thanx (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: Lestat
1 Replies

8. AIX

swap space / paging space

how do you get the paging space reduced without rebooting the machine ? the os is aix (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: aaronh
2 Replies

9. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

pageing space vs swap space

Hello, I would like to know if there is any difference between the pageing space and the swap space. Thank you in advance. (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: VeroL
1 Replies

10. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

SWAP SPACE

All, I am using SOLARIS 7. I have formated my hard drive to consist of only 150MB of swap space. This isn't enough considering I am running Oracle. How do I create additional swap space? Please list sources or commands. PS mkswap doesn't work on my machine. ( I have swap and... (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: SmartJuniorUnix
5 Replies
Login or Register to Ask a Question