> I've installed solaris express and its been working > great. While creating a small multi-process perl > program I ran the gnome "system monitor" tool to view > memory usage. When the program runs real ram usages > increases as expected. However, the tool indicated > that I wasn't using any swap which I thought was kind > of unusual. > > How/Can I tell if the swap partition is being used. > Is there something that will tell you if any page > faults are being generated? > > df gives the following info > > swap 850M 876K 849M 1% > /etc/svc/volatile > o it would seem that the swap partition(slice) is > mounted and available. Maybe the gnome tool doesn't > report this information correctly?
That has nothing to do with swap slice(s). tmpfs (RAM-disk-like filesystems, except based on virtual rather than physical memory) are shown as mounted on swap, but that doesn't indicate anything about disk swap partition usage. To check on the latter, use /usr/sbin/swap -l The amount in use is the difference between the last two numbers (blocks-free). The blocks in question are 512 bytes in size. With any other tool (sar, vmstat, etc) make sure you know what size units it's reporting and just what it reports; not all page faults have anything to do with I/O to/from disk-based swap, and some figures may be reporting the totality of VM resources managed by swapfs (google for swapfs solaris) rather than just disk-based swap. Unless you know just what the tool is telling you, the numbers will be pretty meaningless in absolute terms (although still might provide half a clue when compared to one another on the same OS version (some of the reporting details may have changed from one version to another). It might be handy if someone that really was into that sort of thing were to put together a cheat sheet with details of which tool reports what, and what might have changed at certain OS releases. Also, where it's less than clear what's being reported, some extra detail in the man pages might be helpful. This message posted from opensolaris.org
