Memory question - top reporting vs. stm

[Tonya Underwood]

I have 32GB physical Memory

When I run top, it shows only 12GB memory. Why is this? What is top showing?

Thanks

Tonya Underwood



-- Information Tool Log for IPF_MEMORY on path memory --

Log creation time: Wed Sep 5 09:03:35 2007

Hardware path: memory


Basic Memory Description

Module Type: MEMORY
Page Size: 4096 Bytes
Total Physical Memory: N/A
Total Configured Memory: 32768 MB <---- confirmed 32GB physmem
Total Deconfigured Memory: N/A


System: camebpp1 Wed Sep 5 09:36:08 2007
Load averages: 0.28, 0.23, 0.27
301 processes: 258 sleeping, 41 running, 2 zombies
Cpu states:
CPU LOAD USER NICE SYS IDLE BLOCK SWAIT INTR SSYS
0 0.26 13.1% 2.6% 3.6% 80.7% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
1 0.26 21.3% 4.0% 1.8% 73.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
2 0.31 2.2% 24.7% 5.8% 67.4% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
3 0.27 5.8% 8.4% 3.4% 82.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
--- ---- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
avg 0.28 10.5% 9.9% 3.6% 75.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%

Memory: 12107260K (3848996K) real,

^
|
Reporting 11.5GB. What is this reporting?

[Don Morris_1 · Accepted solution]

top is reporting the Virtual and Real (i.e. physical) memory used by user processes, and only that used by user processes.

As such, free memory, memory used by the kernel, firmware, etc. is not reflected there.

top is a view of User space only -- not the system as a whole.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Personally, I use swapinfo -tam

Thats the best tool for overall memory use and health on system.

The answer to your question is the tools were written differently. top has been known to have a few bugs as well.

This variance could be explained by the difference between 1K an 1000 bytes. 24 bytes. Calculation errors.

SEP

[Tonya Underwood]

Is there a way to tell who has memory reserved?

[whiteknight]

Tonya,

You may obtain the kmeminfo tool to see the detail info of memory usage, please obtain from HP support

example:-
Physical memory usage summary (in page/byte/percent):

Physical memory = 262144 1.0g 100%
Free memory = 75831 296.2m 29%
User processes = 46854 183.0m 18% details with -user
System = 137203 535.9m 52%
Kernel = 71667 279.9m 27% kernel text and data
Dynamic Arenas = 43143 168.5m 16% details with -arena
M_TEMP = 32934 128.6m 13%
M_SPINLOCK = 2409 9.4m 1%
M_VXVM = 1367 5.3m 1%
ALLOCB_MBLK_LM = 1296 5.1m 0%
M_SWAP = 1038 4.1m 0%
Other arenas = 4099 16.0m 2% details with -arena
Super page pool = 1372 5.4m 1% details with -kas
Static Tables = 21621 84.5m 8% details with -static
nbuf = 8160 31.9m 3% bufcache headers
pfdat = 5926 23.1m 2%
text = 2175 8.5m 1% vmunix text section
htbl2_0 = 2048 8.0m 1%
pfn_to_virt = 987 3.9m 0%
Other tables = 2324 9.1m 1% details with -static
Buffer cache = 65536 256.0m 25% details with -bufcache
UFC file mrg = 0 0.0 0%
UFC meta mrg = 0 0.0 0%

WK
please assign points

[Tonya Underwood]

I know of kmeminfo. But how can I tell who is reserving the 15GB reserved.

[whiteknight]

Tonya,

Memory reserved -> are you refering to dbc_pct_max % ? Usually this parameter will determine how much memory will be reserved for buffer cache.

WK

please assign points

[Tonya Underwood]

No. I wanted to know what application is reserving the 15GB. I know dbc_max_pct. I know kmeminfo. I want to know what application is reserving how much of the 15GB to come up with a grand total of 15GB

example:

oracle reserving 5GB
SAP reserving 4GB
I2app reserving 6GB

TOTAL 15GB reserved