Do I have enough Memory?

[Jesse Willardson]

My book says "r" should be larger than "b" making me think that I need more RAM
$ vmstat 1 3
procs memory
r b w avm free re
0 297 0 9720 279416 22

Swapper is hardly using any resources though:
$ ps -ef | grep swap
root 0 0 0 Oct 15 ? 0:07 swapper

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks in Advance

Jesse

[Victor BERRIDGE]

To start, swapinfo will tell you how much swap is used

[Victor BERRIDGE · Accepted solution]

example:
>swapinfo
Kb Kb Kb PCT START/ Kb
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED LIMIT RESERVE PRI NAME
dev 1048576 0 1048576 0% 0 - 1 /dev/vg00/lvol2
reserve - 888832 -888832

You can see here that no disk (/dev...) is used...

[John Palmer]

Hi Jesse,

'swapper' doesn't do what you may think it does since 10.20. What resources has 'vhand' consumed?

Did you post the last line from vmstat or the first? The first is not indicative of current conditions, it's cumulative from when the system was booted. The second and subsequent lines give current conditions.

Regards,
John

[Lasse Knudsen]

It looks like you have plenty of memory.

However I do not understand 269 blocked processes.

[Anthony deRito]

Determine why you have so many processes blocked on resources. It does not appear to be a memory problem. Use GlancePlus and go into the process list screens to detect what the processes are waiting for.

Tony

[Alan Riggs]

This is a patch issue. vmstat can sometimes overreport (drastically) the number of blocked processes. PHKL_16301 corrects the issue. (Check to see if it has been superceded. My note on this is nearly a year old.)