Solaris 9 (Sparc): Swap Issue

[christiansen]

Hi Folks.

In our datacenter we have a weird occurence: one of our SPARC Servers running Solaris 9.

The system is running a Java Application which is part of a distributed CMS Web publishing system.

Now the problem is: even though there is plenty of physical RAM (2 Gig) and almost all of it is actually *free*, the OS starts to swap out memory pages like *mad*.

If anyone has something to mention, it would be great to hear about.

I am not sure at this point whether the problem exists somewhere within the Solaris-specific three-staged swapping model (states are 'reserved' - 'allocated' - 'used'), but it seems likely.

--> This may be an OS bug. Anyone here with similar experience?

Thanks in advance and have a nice WE...

;-) Sven

 

[marrow]

1) Check what files are under /tmp
Sometimes people/processes have been to know to use this area, i.e. oracle, Sun maintenance.
2) Run "vmstat 2 10" and display the results on tektips.

We have a live system that has 1Gb Memory and although swap starts out OK (when a boot clears it down), the swap is gradually being eaten away and we can't see where it goes, although our memory is heavily used. This also happens on a 2Gb system, we had to tidy up some of our scripts to point output to /dev/null.