Solaris

Trying to reach a formula on Solaris 9 for calculating the Memory utilization percentage, i have encountered a lot of indicators and metrices, however i have faced a case today which confused me.

How to get a Zero Scan Rate along an hour whilst the Paging activity (Pages IN & Pages Out) are not Zero ?

Kindly if any one have an explanation for the case above or any other assist regarding the issue of Balancing the Scan Rate value along with Percentage of utilized Memory to reach the overall memory utilization.

Programs are started with no pages mapped and then page fault themselves into memory. This means that only the portions or a program that are used actually consume memory. That has been going on for a very long time and it means that page-ins are normal.

Memory mapped files allow a process to map a datafile into the process memory. By moving stuff into this region, a file write is implied and this results in a page-out. If the file was also in the buffer cache, the cache would need to be updated. Solaris no longer uses the buffer cache except for meta-data. Data is loaded into pages as needed in a unified manner. If scan rate is zero, you are not out of free memory. Page-ins and page-outs will happen a lot.

Thanks for your meaty reply.

However i need to conclude, does the Scan Rate ONLY is an adequate indicator for the Physical Memory utilization ?
And if so, how can i scale this Scan Rate value (pages/sec) to reflect into a percentage reflecting the utilization ?

Non-zero scan rate indicates that the system needs physical memory. It is the number of pages that the system looked at to find pages it can swap out. I do not understand your scale question.

I mean that in order to reach a fixed figure representing the (Utilization Percentage of the Memory), i have to differentiate between Scan Rate value if it is 10 pages/sec, 100 pages/sec and 100 pages/sec, each value will represent different level of utilization.
I know that he non-zero value means the need of more physical Memory, but still diffrent values means different levels of utilization.