Solaris

Hi All,

We have a server with Solaris 10 installed. The total memory of the server is 64GB. In order to check the memory info of the server I use "top" utility that gives me total and free memory in real-time.

I have also installed a Sun container (non-global zone) on top of parent operating system (global zone). Now in order to check the memory utilization I use the same "top" utility even here, but the output is something absurd.

So is there any way or a third party utility ( like top) that would give me total memory present and memory free/usage within the container.

Thanks....

Memory utilization is measured by paging. The other metrics are just fluff. Free memory occurs when a program exits, and the "RAM mapped to swap" is utterly freed, but that is just a fluke of circumstance. It the system needed a page for anyone's page fault, it is nice if it can find free pages, but normally it just takes idle pages with no or little harm done to anyone else's throughput. If idle pages come back in use, then the page needs to be re-established in a new RAM page. If that happens too often, you have too little RAM for your working sets or an inadvertant RAM hog. What is a RAM hog? Well, I once wrote a fast fgrep that used mmap(), and tested it with every readable file. It rolled every non-wired page of every other app out and filled RAM with pages from files that nobody would reference again. Even when a file is not mmap()'d any more, and the app that mmap()'d it has exited, it remains in RAM timing out in case another app wants to mmap() the same file page. I apoloigized to the other developers, and made a mental note about VM's limitations. Late model Solaris has taken to doing read i/o using mmap(), so . . . .

it is better to use the solaris internal tools for that kind of reporting... have a look at "prstat" which is similar to top and has a lot of options, even for container... (prstat -Z).

I use

Code:

prstat -Z

to see how much memory a container is using. Run from the global zone, this shows me how much memory each container is using compared to the other containers and the global zone.


HTH

Thanks DukeNuke2..

prstat -Z is a good command. I was able to fetch the required details using its output.