[Sunhelp] top & memory

[Yoho, Cindy]

Do you grok vmstat? 

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Tim Conrad [SMTP:tconrad at newyork.edisonproject.com]
> Sent:	Monday, October 16, 2000 1:57 PM
> To:	SunHelp
> Subject:	[Sunhelp] top & memory
> 
> 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
> 
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