Solaris

We have Sun OS running on spark :

SunOS ciniwnpr67 5.10 Generic_118833-24 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440

Having Physical RAM :

Sol10box # prtconf | grep Mem
Memory size: 8192 Megabytes

My Top Output is :

130 processes: 129 sleeping, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 98.8% idle, 0.2% user, 1.0% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap
Memory: 8192M real, 343M free, 2282M swap in use, 2195M swap free

Which shows about 7 gigs of RAM already consumed.

My sar -k shows :

SunOS ciniwnpr67 5.10 Generic_118833-24 sun4u 08/07/2008

07:29:53 sml_mem alloc fail lg_mem alloc fail ovsz_alloc fail
07:29:54 4184032128 4044621477 0 901931008 621211704 1 1723777024 0

And if i under stood it right then i have around 4044621477 + 621211704 + 1723777024 Bytes of memory or 4.5 gigs used by kernel itself ??

If it is true then it i think some thing is wrong with my solaris installtion Any suggestions pls ?

And not to forget, as a rule of thumb, swap device should be configured double the size than of your physical memory. (16384)
V440 is a stable server. Yours should keep going.

well here is the issue ..:

As per Top i am using 7 gigs of RAm.. now the moment i run some thing else then the current applications it page outs increases significantly from almot "0" to 4ooo +

That is causing the new processs to take more time ..

check this out
How to Check Kernel Memory Allocation (sar -k) (System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration) - Sun Microsystems
do this:
# prtmem
#netstat -kp | grep pp_kernel
#mdb -k

here is the thing :

# prtmem - is a part of memtool and that is not recomended to run on prod i guess

#netstat -kp | grep pp_kernel
For me there is no option as - k in netstat on solaris 10

#mdb -k

I really dont have any idea about this dubugger but i will chk it out ..

Tell me this thoguh what sar -k shows in my case .. didnt that meant that kernel is using so much memory ?

That is a very old rule of thumb which I no longer agree with. Memory is so cheap and plentiful these days that you should hardly ever require swap, if you do it is a sign of problems. I generally don't ever configure more than 4GB of swap, even on a 64+GB system.

In fact, if your physical memory is alot, of course Im not asking you to give 128 GB for your swap. But you will t least need 16Gb of swap for a 64 0r 128 configuration minimally.

This is the architecture of Solaris. You will need additional swap for your paging and the space for your coredump(which might be Huge in size). You won't want your system to crash further after a system panic, would you?