System is Paging ...

[Coolmar]

Hi,

My system is hpux 11.11 and has 4 cpus and 8GB of memory. However, it seems to be paging and possibly in trouble memory-wise...but with 8GB, this shouldn't be happening. We also have Oracle 9i running and the SGAs are at a total of 1 GB.

MEMORY REPORT Users= 3
Event Current Cumulative Current Rate Cum Rate High Rate
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page Faults 1289 1377 238.7 110.1 238.7
Page In 429 467 79.4 37.3 79.4
Page Out 0 0 0.0 0.0 0.0
KB Paged In 0kb 0kb 0.0 0.0 0.0
KB Paged Out 0kb 0kb 0.0 0.0 0.0
Reactivations 0 0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Deactivations 0 0 0.0 0.0 0.0
KB Deactivated 0kb 0kb 0.0 0.0 0.0
VM Reads 3 3 0.5 0.2 0.5
VM Writes 2 2 0.5 0.1 0.3

Total VM : 12.6gb Sys Mem : 1.74gb User Mem: 5.84gb Phys Mem: 8.12gb
Active VM: 11.4gb Buf Cache: 400.0mb Free Mem: 140.3mb


vmstat:
procs memory page faults cpu
r b w avm free re at pi po fr de sr in sy cs us sy id
1 0 0 2921112 36892 133 12 3 0 0 0 0 1043 8320 1017 1 1 98
1 0 0 2921112 36891 107 9 2 0 0 0 0 1042 7816 1061 0 1 99
1 0 0 2921112 36916 181 9 1 0 0 0 0 1061 8364 1061 2 9 89
1 0 0 2962328 36917 145 7 1 0 0 0 0 1049 7715 1040 2 3 95
1 0 0 2962328 36916 116 5 1 0 0 0 0 1070 7448 1031 1 1 98
1 0 0 2962328 36916 92 4 1 0 0 0 0 1065 7068 1012 1 1 98
1 0 0 2962328 36916 73 3 1 0 0 0 0 1052 6579 993 0 0 100
1 0 0 2962328 36916 58 2 1 0 0 0 0 1070 7051 996 1 6 93
1 0 0 2962328 36916 47 1 0 0 0 0 0 1058 6629 987 1 5 94
1 0 0 2962328 36916 38 0 0 0 0 0 0 1047 6230 974 0 0 100


swapinfo -tam
Mb Mb Mb PCT START/ Mb
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED LIMIT RESERVE PRI NAME
dev 4096 1658 2438 40% 0 - 1 /dev/vg00/lvol2
dev 5000 0 5000 0% 0 - 0 /dev/vg00/lvswap2
reserve - 6912 -6912
memory 6352 1337 5015 21%
total 15448 9907 5541 64% - 0 -

[Coolmar]

Forgot to add:

dbc_max_pct 5 - 5
dbc_min_pct 5 - 5

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You are paging in. Every process (except for duplicate copies of the same program) pages in and that is perfectly normal. You only need to concern yourself with pageouts. When the box is under memory pressure and you are running more processes than you you have physical memory then you will see paging out. You are fine.

[Coolmar]

Ok...thanks. I just find the load average a little high 4.75 3.75 ...etc.

[Coolmar]

Also, the "mem util" in glance is at 99% all the time.

[Steven E. Protter]

A system can have a very high load average and be fine. Or it can be stopped near death. It depends on the processes.

For long term measurement:

http://www.hpux.ws/system.perf.sh

Plan for a memory upgrade if system use is going to continue to rise.

SEP

[Ted Buis]

Oracle will typically use all memory that is available, and why not? You should use what you have. So you don't have a problem unless someone is complaining about performance. The system may give more performance with more memory (or not as there could be other bottlenecks).

If performance is a problem, then I would recomend using GlancePlus to diagnose it, or iostat to see if there is an I/O bottleneck.

[Coolmar]

Thanks everyone.