Hi,

On 14 August 2014 16:12, Philip Yarra <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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?
>
>
See the description in the Solaris Internals book; hopefully this link will
get you
there:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=3Ys27a_I1tEC&pg=PT535&dq=solaris+virtual+swap+space&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SlXxU8K8ENKgogScxoDQCQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=solaris%20virtual%20swap%20space&f=false

Gavin


> Cheers,
> Philip.
>
>
>
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