High system memory utilization at boot

[John J Garrott]

We recently upgraded some HP-UX partitions running Oracle databases on our SuperDome from 11.23 to 11.31. They have 8Gb of memory allocated, as these are small development databases. However, after the upgrade we are seeing nearly 40% memory utilization by system processes and cache on these systems after booting and before starting up any Oracle databases or related processes.

In older versions of HP-UX we would set the dbc_min_pct down from the default value of 50% to resolve this, but these parms are no longer available in 11.31.

Any idea on what s causing this high memory utilization at boot by the system and what parameters must be changed to resolve this?

[Patrick Wallek]

To see the utilization is of kernel parameters you can use the kcusage command.

# kcusage

will show usage.

If you want to see a specific kernel parm you can do

# kcusage filecache_max

You are correct in that dbc_[min|max]_pct have been removed from 11.31. The roughly equivalent parameter is filecache_[min|max]. The defaults for these are also 5 and 50 %, but they are supposed to adjust automatically. If you run the 'kcusage filecache_max' command, you will see how much file cache is currently in use.

Like, dbc_max_pct, filecache_max can be adjusted, but you shouldn't really need to. However, check the usage and make your determination from there.

[John J Garrott]

Patrick,

Thank you for your assistance.

John Garrott