Solaris

Your issue is possibly with Vxfs which indeed allocate kernel memory for its file cache. There have been some memory leak issues with Vxfs on Solaris 10 so first make sure your are up to date with Solaris 10 and Vxfs patches.

The equivalent Linux free on Solaris is "mdb -k". It shows 3% of the RAM is used by the file cache (free - cachelist). However, only UFS is using that cache. Vxfs (and ZFS for that matters) both directly use kernel memory.

A high number of page outs aren't a correct metric to identify RAM shortage on Solaris. It might just shows there is a lot of I/Os on your system. Better to watch vmstat sr column (scan rate). If it stays low of null, your system is behaving correctly. Unused RAM is wasted RAM anyway.

Let me try vmstat before and after running additional prgrams and i will paste the output here.. thanks

Here u go :


sr
15
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0 -- before

_____________
After running new process
__________
737
1005
5875
18380
53504
14042
91957

sr
18596
34646
69300
37315
679

This is only SR ourput of vmstat

What is this process that you're running, and how much memory does it need?

Well prrocess that i am running is not that memory intensive .. If u see the post from the start .. the story is that more then 82 % of my RAM is consumed weather i run some applcation or not by the kernel itself ... as per mdb -k

Your system is definitely RAM bounded and not by some application as you just wrote but either by the kernel itself (unlikely) or by a kernel module (likely Vxfs).

When was the server last rebooted ? It might be a memory leak. Did you check the patches ?

The Solaris 10 equivalent is kstat -p unix:0:system_pagesp_kernel. (That's colon-p, not a sticky-outy-tongue-smiley)

What is the output of ps -eo pid,rss,vsz,args | sort -rn -k 3,3 | head -20?

What is the output of ipcs -m?