Solaris9 losing 30Mb of swap per day 1

[marrow]

Have a pair of clustered E450 3Gb Memory, 4Gb swap, have 170 processes each and 2 & 1 ora-dbases per side . Reboot clears, but lose 800Mb immediately on startup. Our DBA likes running daily oracle processes into /TMP (1.8Mb of their data always there), we don't like this at all but nothing we can do about this. Any method of finding the missing swap? After 2 weeks we are down to 2.6Gb swap. Recently upgraded memory and much better since!

 

[cndcadams]

marrow;

I did some looking on this and there is really not much I could find. Sun did have a bug report 4227955
which as usual does not have a workaround except to reboot (what a joke).

This may be something you need to open a service call with Sun on if you have a contract.

Thanks

CA

 

[SamBones]

Unless you've set it up differently, [tt]/tmp[/tt] uses swap, so the more you have in [tt]/tmp[/tt], the more swap that's being used. See if what's in [tt]/tmp[/tt] grows at the rate you see swap disappearing.

1.8Mb in [tt]/tmp[/tt] is not a lot. Unless your swap is real small. You can add swap pretty easily if it's a problem.

"...down to 2.6Gb swap" is not really bad for a machine serving Oracle. Solaris likes to use swap even if it's got plenty of free memory, so I don't see this as bad. Unless it keeps disappearing until you are really running out of both real memory and swap. Then I would look for a process that has a big virtual memory size. Do the following command...

ps -e -o pid,ppid,vsz,rss,osz,pmem,args

From the man pages...

vsz   The total size of the process in  virtual memory,
      in kilobytes.

rss   The resident set size of the process, in kilobytes.

osz   The total size of the process in  virtual  memory,
      in pages.

pmem  The ratio of the process's resident set  size  to
      the physical memory on the machine, expressed as a
      percentage.

That is, [tt]vsz[/tt] is the total size of the process (real and swapped). [tt]rss[/tt] is how much is currently in memory. [tt]osz[/tt] is how must swap it's using. [tt]pmem[/tt] is what percentage of real memory the process is currently using.

This should help you find which process is using a lot of swap space.

 

[elgrandeperro]

A temp file that is opened and isn't closed (and even removed) can take up swap. As long as the process has the file open it will take up space, and as stated, the file doesn't even appear in /tmp because it is removed.

lsof can find the file for you.

gene

 

[marrow]

Thanks for your replies everyone, much appreciated, will investgate next week - Marrow

 

[marrow]

Thanks again everyone. Sambones that was particularly helpful, I have been able to highlight a process that maybe our problem.