Identifying the source of pagouts

[Dan_173]

The VMSTAT po value is telling me that my host is paging fairly substantially. Is there any way of finding the root-cause of this paging?

That is, pages from many processes may be paged out but only because of one or more rogue processes demanding buffers. Is there any way to identify...
a) those processes having their pages paged out?
b) the process(s) demanding free pages causing a) ?

Thank-you
Dan

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Use ps -efl and the first column will show swapped processes as 0, in-core processes as 1. ps is not really aware of process deactivation or paging so this is a crude metric. As far as the processes that are using RAM currently, a quick method is:

UNIX95= ps -eo "flags,vsz,pid,args"|sort -rnk1,2 | more

This sorts processes according to the ps flags column, then by the amount of RAM used. See the man page for flag meanings. NOTE: you may be paging due to memory mapped files, not processes being deactivated and paged out.

[yogesh_4]

Glancw will also be helpful for you in this case. you can try #glance -f >/tmp/glancefile and then chack that file.