[SunHELP] Running out of swap when real memory is available

[Mr Rene Occelli]

Hi

I'm not a specialist, below what I have understood
Because Solaris uses real memory to swap when memory is available
you can see this with swap command

Loem%swap -l
swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1   32,25     16 4090800 4090800
Loem%swap -s
total: 451352k bytes allocated + 19488k reserved = 470840k used, 3031744k 
available

-----> remark  3Gb available

here on a Balde 2500 with 2Gbyte of memory
format shows
  1       swap    wu       0 -  1415        1.95GB    (1416/0/0)   4090824

2gb swap on disk

---> Only 2Gb on disk

and top shows this   

Memory: 2048M real, 1200M free, 466M swap in use, 2955M swap free
   PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    TIME    CPU COMMAND
 29448 sett3      1   0   19  193M  182M cpu/0  235.7H 49.90% fluent.6.2.16
   358 root       3  59    0 5520K 2560K sleep   39:21  0.29% automountd
.......
----> 3Gg swap free
This is confirmed by df 
Loem%df -h
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0      5.8G   4.7G  1021M    83%    /
/devices                 0K     0K     0K     0%    /devices
ctfs                     0K     0K     0K     0%    /system/contract
proc                     0K     0K     0K     0%    /proc
mnttab                   0K     0K     0K     0%    /etc/mnttab
swap                   2.9G   1.0M   2.9G     1%    /etc/svc/volatile
....

If you machine has a lot of memory, all swap ( /tmp  /var/memory ...)
are in memory so you disk can sleep .....

Hope this helps
R Occelli