topic Re: SLES9 Swap in Operating System - Linux

SLES9 Swap

Mark Wolf_2 — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 10:15:43 GMT

I have a server that has plenty of head room for memory and but it is swapping out some processes.

vmstat -s shows:
6163452 total memory
5912576 used memory
3960448 active memory
1089548 inactive memory
250876 free memory
83020 buffer memory
2938988 swap cache
8400704 total swap
237748 used swap
8162956 free swap
11982261 non-nice user cpu ticks
24436 nice user cpu ticks
2357426 system cpu ticks
63791902 idle cpu ticks
7682023 IO-wait cpu ticks
19768 IRQ cpu ticks
422612 softirq cpu ticks
60985088 pages paged in
244024328 pages paged out
114819 pages swapped in
160341 pages swapped out
681264975 interrupts
1930286078 CPU context switches
1156043850 boot time
4038456 forks

I don't think this box should be swapping at all. It is and I would like to know what proccess are being swapped out. Is there a way to tell which process is be sent to swap?

Mark

Re: SLES9 Swap

Ivan Ferreira — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 10:50:15 GMT

Is this a database server? Last time I talked with a Oracle DBA, he toldme that depending of the oracle configuration (SGA, PGA, etc) the Oracle may "force" paging even when there is free memory available.

Monitor your system page in and page out with vmstat and sar to identify if the system is paging.

The ps command ouput had a column indicating that a process is in W state, but this is not valid for 2.6 kernels anymore.

Re: SLES9 Swap

Mark Wolf_2 — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 10:54:58 GMT

Leave it to Oracle....I am running a 2.6 kernel so I am SOL for this suggestion.

:-(

Mark

Re: SLES9 Swap

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 11:32:53 GMT

Shalom,

See if your Oracle DBA can reduce the SGA. If not, purchase some RAM, its not that expensive.

vmstat doesn't show oracle being spapped in and out, I guess that process is too busy to be swapped.

SEP

Re: SLES9 Swap

Mark Wolf_2 — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:11:46 GMT

The Answer, Throw more money at the problem, No need to understand the systems and configurations.....We added more memory.