[Sunhelp] top & memory

[Tim Conrad]

While I may be on crack, and somehow slightly confused. Here's the deal:

I have an E5500 with 6GB of RAM (Running Solaris 2.6) that really isn't
used much right now. The purpose that it was purchased for is still
being worked on for rollout, so, essentially, the box is very very very
lightly used.

However, I consistantly show, through top, that there is only around 250
MB of memory left over, which seems quite insane. I've stopped the
software that is running on it (Lawson financial software), so that the
only thing running is the stuff that comes with a basic OS install,
along with the vxvm stuff. It went down to around 300 MB of memory left
over.

My thoughts on the situation:

1) top is lying. I remember reading that somewhere. Someone mentioned a
'better' tool that top to measure memory. I don't remember the name of
it. I tried getting a different version of top, thinking there may be
some wierd 32/64bit wierdness. Update: So, I had a sudden moment of
realization, and I remembered it was proctool. Which, I downloaded, and
it reflects the same information shown in top.

2) I need to get out more often.

3) I don't fully grok how memory works in Solaris.

last pid: 11795;  load averages:  0.04,  0.02,  0.02
17:39:36
64 processes:  61 sleeping, 2 zombie, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 98.9% idle,  0.0% user,  1.1% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0%
swap
Memory: 6144M real, 284M free, 136K swap in use, 2001M swap free

In linux, it takes some of the physical memory and creates cache space.
Is this possibly what's happening? Under top, when sorting by size, it
says that there's a process using 79 MB of memory, the next 3 are around
20, 4 or so around 15, the rest are 10 or less. Doesn't appear to add up
to 5 GB of memory, even if one adds it all up.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for any input.

Tim Conrad