System slow, virtual memory nearly full!!

[Jonathan Caplette_1]

Hi guys!!!

I've a system with Oracle Databases running on it, and those databases are operated by the application BaaN and that a production environment....

My problem is that my system since about 3-4 days becames slower and slower, I checked with "top" utilitie, what was running, and I saw that the state of my virtual memory (free) was reducing , so I used vmstat -n and I saw it to... So I wanna know is the virtual memory can slow a lot a system, and how can I correct that???

Thanks
Jonathan

[Jonathan Caplette_1]

will somebody please help me... or will I've to reboot my system everytime that my VM comes full????

I need help!!!

[John Palmer · Accepted solution]

Well it's possible that you have a memory leak somewhere but it's normal for the system to use almost all available memory.

First thing to check for is processes with a large virtual size, try Bill Hassell's psram command:-

UNIX95= ps -e -o ruser,vsz,pid,args | sort -rnk2 | more

The list is sorted largest virtual size first.

Please post the output from the above command.

Regards,
John

[Jonathan Caplette_1]

Hi John,

here's the output of the command... all I see is the users processes that are taking almost all the mem... but can this slow a system a lot to say that we can't work on it?!?!

Thanks
Jonathan

[John Palmer]

You haven't got any processes with a large virtual size.

The output from the following would be useful:-

vmstat 5 5
iostat 5 5
swapinfo -mt
ipcs -am
top

Regards,
John

[Jonathan Caplette_1]

OK thanks John,

I'm gonna check that... evrything seems ok... I gonna check for the network if there's a problem...

Thanks for the help!!!

[Martin Johnson]

You should look into your Oracle database activity. Are there searches of tables where the table contents is increasing?

When I have been asked to look into slow response time, about 70% of the time it turns out to be database problems. The database has not been tuned to handle the volume.

Remember, when you reboot the system, more things get cleared out than just memory.

HTH
Marty