[SunHELP] what best for memory monitor

[Nicholas Dronen]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 12:01:58PM +0800, MUHAMED, Mohd. Khairul wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> If I am monitoring memory utilisation what is the simplest and easiest
> command to use? I don't see what I am looking for in vmstat, could I be
> looking at it wrongly?

Generally you want to look at the 'fre' column, which represents
the size of the free list (the number of free "physical" pages in
the virtual memory subsystem).  I believe if you're using Solaris
8 you can take this number at face value.  If you're using Solaris
7 or earlier, you'll have to take into consideration that the free
list in those versions of Solaris includes the file buffer cache,
so 'fre' on a system that's not under-utilized will be consistently
low.

I think there are some more sophisticated tools available from
Sun to monitor memory usage, but it's a good idea to understand
the meaning of vmstat output before hopping off to other tools.

Regards,

Nicholas Dronen