Solaris

vmstat 10 2 will monitor an interval of 20 seconds, whereas vmstat 1 10 will only cover 10 seconds. Both are not sensible invocations for long-term monitoring. Try vmstat 600 (every 10 minutes) or something like that. The reason why you want a long interval is that you are not interested in any "spike" but the average usage of a system. Further, every polling of the stats also places a (slight but non-zero) load onto the system. You don't want your monitoring system to create the bottleneck it is intended to prevent.

Yes, correct

You don't want to avoid swap usage you want to avoid swapping activity. Something being in the swap doesn't hurt - putting it there and getting it back into memory again is what hurts. Therefore looking at a number which only tells you how much swap is used doesn't tell you what you really want to know.

Sometimes this is the case - it might be better overall if the damage you take by swapping something out is outweighed by the gain you may get from the memory freed that way which can be used otherwise. In general (but notice: "in general" doesn't mean "always") it makes sense to size a system in a way that swapping doesn't take place in normal operation. Swap is generally a "plan B", not the "plan A".


Yes. But in a professional environment it makes sense to size a system sufficiently. Memory does not come free of charge and it pays (or rather - saves) to give a system as much as it needs - but not more. It is the job of a systems administrator to walk that fine line between oversized (=wasting money) and undersized (=hurting the purpose).

You might want to read this little introduction to performance tuning and monitoring for more details about swapping.

I hope that helps.

bakunin

Hi both (Jilliagre and Bakunin) and all,

Thank you so much for your advice and guidance. I can't see where i could have possibly understand more if not here.
Thanks for the link on the introduction to performance tuning and monitoring as well.

It seems like understanding the OS kernel and its working is slowly like a lost trade; people no longer care how it works, people just want things to work..

Thanks for staying around to keep the forum alive, we need you guys around..

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On a side note on ZFS ARC, i do realize it is sucking up RAM and its not reflected as freemem in neither vmstat or sar.

As mentioned my MadeInGermany, i do set a reserve hint -> this kinda set a upper limit on how much ZFS ARC can grow up to.

But how do i know if the amount of memory available and allocated to ZFS ARC is sufficient or not ?

Regards,
Noob

Check the cache hit ratio to see how efficient it is. The closer to 100%, the better.

If you can fit all the files you use in RAM (hit rate 100%) and still have room enough for the applications and other consumers RAM usage, go for it and set the ZFS ARC size to be able to host everything.

On the opposite and more likely situation, that's a trade off and you should measure usage, do tests that last a few days or more, see how your RAM is used, see how performance is impacted by giving more memory to the cache or more memory to the applications, and act accordingly.

Hi Jilliagre,


Sorry for asking.. where/how do i see the cache hit for ZFS ARC...


Regards,
Noob

That's a good question. You can compute it from kstat values, e.g.:

Code:

kstat -p "::arcstats:demand_*data*" 10 10

The hit ratio is equal to 100.*xxx_hits/(xxx_hits+xxx_misses) with xxx being demand_data or demand_metadata

Hi all,

I am sorry to bring up this thread again.
Recently, i have same heavy swap usage against the physical swap space despite having physical free ram.

I read up this old thread > Out of swap but RAM available >> and my understanding is that memory reservation will eat up swap-space if there isn't enough virtual swap for reservation ?

But again, read these directly from Solaris (Doc ID 1010585.1) in Oracle metalink somehow indicate that memory reservation against physical memory or swap doesn't actually take up the physical space.


So does memory reservation actually take up swap space or not ?

Regards,
Noob

Both the linked thread and MOS Document are correct.

vmstat is reporting that there is unused RAM and it is true. There is no data stored on that RAM.

malloc fails because there is no more swap or RAM available. All of it is either used or unused but reserved.

Let me try a metaphor: if you enter a restaurant and see many empty tables, that doesn't mean you can sit on any of them. They might all be reserved by customers that aren't there yet (and maybe some will never show up).