> Hi, > > I've installed OSOL 2009.06 in a laptop with 2GB of > RAM and once I get the desktop up and running and > open the gnome performance monitor, it reports that > 1.8 out of 2 GB of physical RAM are in use and 0 of > SWAP. I used to run linux (ubuntu) on the same laptop > and the perf monitor would report 700Mb. I know linux > is not the same as solaris, but if i do a simple: > > svcs -l > > I get lots of services running, does anyone have a > small list of required services, for example in my > laptop i dont need a sendmail deamon, All I do is to > use Firefox, Evolution, Netbeans, java and gcc > > Do I need all the ipsec, kerberos, crypto stuff since > I'm not in a VPN... > > Thanks!
Free memory lies, particularly due to the ZFS ARC cache, I think. (ISTR reading rumors that one day, the VM page cache and the ZFS ARC cache may be reunified, and that they're separate in large part because the existing VM page cache does not lend itself at all well to the needs of a copy-on-write filesystem. Perhaps at that day, free memory will no longer lie, or at any rate lie less.) Enough pressure on memory is supposed to cause ZFS to release memory for other purposes, AFAIK. If it bothers you, you could add a line like set zfs:zfs_arc_max=536870912 to /etc/system, and reboot. That would limit the ARC to 512 MB. The problem is that you never know without trying whether any attempt by you to "tune" things won't make them worse, because the default behavior tries pretty hard to do the right thing. If you want to get a better picture of how much memory is being used by what, try # echo ::memstat|mdb -k It's very slow - it may take a couple of minutes to run. And it doesn't break out the ARC size AFAIK - that's lumped in with "Kernel". Or if you just want to see how big the ARC is, # kstat zfs:0:arcstats:size which is much quicker. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
