HP-UX

All,
I have a software application that requires to find the free memory on the machine. It should work in a hpux Out of the box - in other words, it should use the basic OS commands which are available on every HP-UX machine like top, vmstat and doesn't require the user to purchase 3rd party software like glance.
Also, it will run as a non-root user.

I have been reading this forum about calculating free RAM in this forum and the two most common ways are:

1. Glance (3rd party software)
2. /usr/sbin/swapinfo (must run as root).

Considering I cannot use the above two, what is the option...vmstat?

Now when I run vmstat, it shows
free: 162715
avm: 504267

Where as top shows:
Memory: 319792K (283940K) real, 2116880K (2021256K) virtual, 651088K free Page# 1/14


These numbers don't even match...what am I missing here?

Thanks in advance

performance monitoring in hpux can be done using the following,

glance
gpm
caliper
top; sar; vmstat;
iostat; nfsstat; netstat;
uustat; Glance($)


refer Rosetta Stone for Unix

The units of memory in "vmstat" are "pages". One page = 4 kilobytes (but do check this for your systems).

On large memory systems (more than 2 Gb) some versions of "vmstat" and "top" give wrong figures due to arithmetic overflow. I have not seen this issue with "glance".

In your example, how much memory is fitted and how much swap space is configured?