Swap problem

[DLH]

We are using tivoli to report swap issues on a k580. We are getting alerts on high swap usage. Tivoli appears to be looking a the swapinfo -mt report and says that we have run out of swap space. Here is the swapinfo -mt report:

# swapinfo -mt
Mb Mb Mb PCT
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED
dev 512 0 512 0%
dev 4096 0 4096 0%
reserve - 6768 -6768
memory 2828 706 2122 25%
total 7436 7474 -38 101%

Here is a report from glance:

Current Avg High
---------------------------------
Mem Util | 86% 86% 86%
Swap Util | 45% 45% 45%
---------------------------------

According to Glance, we have plenty of swap space. According to swapinfo we have ran out of swap space.
We haven't had any problems so far except for the annoying tivoli alerts.

Should we be concerned about the high swap space use reported by swapinfo? Is reserve the amount of swap that could potentially be used by various applications but not necessarily being used at this time? Do we need to add more device swap?

[Rita C Workman · Accepted solution]

If you take another look at swapinfo...you are not hitting any device swap. I would have to say you probably have psuedo swap turned on and this is what you are seeing. Remember swapinfo -tm is a total of all avail swap (dev & mem).
So, the system is handling swap (see thread at bottom for explanation of psuedo swap..) and has not had to use any device swap so you are not paging out...
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xa464dfe5920fd5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

You look ok,
/rcw