Hi all,

hoping someone can answer a question I have about Solaris 10 and swap
usage. Clearly there's something I'm not quite getting.

I started investigating because our app servers has 160GB of physical RAM.
However top reports that we have 83GB RAM free, but 38GB of swap in use.
That seems counter to my understanding of swap - a place to swap and page
process memory when physical RAM is exhausted. Since we're nowhere near
exhausting physical RAM, why would we be swapping?

This post:
http://blog.logicmonitor.com/2014/08/12/why-youre-monitoring-solaris-virtual-memory-wrong/
explains some of it for me - swap -l shows we're not really using swap, and
vmstat shows zero for si, so, pi and po. All good.. but can someone please
explain this statement for me?

[Solaris] "... virtualizes the swap space, and includes unused parts of
physical memory as swap space".

What am I missing here? Why would you use unused parts of physical RAM as
the space you use to swap out process memory to when RAM becomes full?

Cheers,
Philip.
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