ps awux / ps -edalf

[lawrenzo]

guys,

I am seeing 99% memory usage, no pages being release and not much processing on the box - approx 120 procs running.

There is 8gb of memory and this is concerning me that something is not configured correctly.

I run ps awux or ps -edalf and calculate the size field, my question is what is the number a representation of in blocks ie is it reporting 512byte blocks or 4k blocks?

Thanks

Chris

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris:

The definitive way to answer what is the value of the 'sz' field output by 'ps' is to interrogate SC_PAGE_SIZE:

# getconf SC_PAGE_SIZE

Regards!

...JRF...

[lawrenzo]

nice one ....

PAGESIZE = 4096 (4k)

Thanks James.

Chris.

[James George_1]

Hi

whats the uptime on this server ?

also check # top 10 and see if any command / process is hanging , some times that can eat up all your memory .

rgds / James

[Bill Hassell]

The HP-UX version of ps has very powerful options to summarize local memory usage. This command will show you all the processes sorted by size (in Kbytes):

UNIX95=1 ps -e -o vsz,ruser,pid,args | sort -rn

Now you will quickly see that all the numbers do not come even close to the amount of RAM you have. ps counts local process memory. It knows nothing about what the kernel uses, nor does it count shared memory usage or the buffer cache. If you never tuned your system, the buffer cache is probably 50% of your memory. Note that memory usage is not is an indication of performance so "not much processing" has nothing to do with memory usage.

[lawrenzo]

Ok thanks chaps,

you are correct Bill, all proc's add to 4.5gb so will check other settings.

Chris.