Swap question

[Eric Yruegas]

I've searched and read and researched, but I've yet to find a suitable answer for the following question:

Server: 8GB RAM, 14GB device swap.

We recently turned SWAPMEM_ON off - and all is well. What I'm seeing in Glance on the memory page is something like this:


Reactivations 5 20 1.1 0.9 2.2
Deactivations 5 20 1.1 0.9 1.1

I understand that deactivations generally mean bad things (swapping), but the reactivations are always the same for the interval, and KB Paged Out is usually zero. Swapinfo tells me that 33MB of each device (there are two) are used.

Vmstat SI/SO columns are identical as well.

Am I *really* swapping? When the reactivations and deactivations are identical and KB Paged Out is zero, what does that indicate?

Thanks for you wisdom in advance!
-E

[Rita C Workman]

Well.....yes and maybe no. Now doesn't that sound clear.

What your seeing is a reflection of the GBL_MEM_SWAPOUT metric during an interval. Now this little beauty, since ver 10, is really a combination of two things that can happen: paging and deactivating a process. This happens when your having memory problems or your system is thrashing. But with your amount of memory, what I think your seeing is that the process is getting deactivated, and before it really pages out....it's getting restarted.

So are you swapping/paging....No I do not believe you are. Are you deactivating...Yes, but not long enough (i.e. within an interval) to actually have that process page out.

Hope that made some sense...
Rgrds,
Rita

[Steven E. Protter]

swap getting reserved? No problem, just means a process openned.

swap getting sued. Look for paging in glance, gpm or sar utilities. Attaching a few sar utils.

SEP