Memory usage summary

From: Eric Watson (ewatson@law.harvard.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 19 2000 - 14:11:10 CDT


Well, the answers came in (are still coming) thick and fast as always. Too
many respondees to thank individually.

One person commented that you should never be into swap - if you are then
you are basically out of memory. My boss said this as well. I'd be
interested in any other comments on this - I've always believed that swap is
there to be used.

Here's the summary:

a. ps -o pmem,vsz,rss,pid,user,command | sort -n |more

or

ps -ef -o pid,user,vsz,rss,comm | sort -k 3n | tail

That will give you the processes using the most virtual memory (for the
most part). Changing the 3 to a 4 should reflect the processes using
the most resident memory.

ps has these nice options since about 2.5, "ps --help" for more info

b. top has a sort by memory usage option. top:
http://www.groupsys.com/topinfo. This should give you all of the
information you want and plenty more.

c. tmpfs. By default /tmp is actually usingtmpfs a memory based filesystem
( using free memory + swap), and if you put a 500MB file on /tmp, you have
just taken 500M of free space from the VM subsystem. You might want to
consider switching /tmp to UFS if you think that could be a problem. Do a
man on tmpfs for more info. df -k /tmp will give you a rough idea of how
much memory /tmp is consuming by looking at the 'used' field.

d. vmstat to get an idea of paging activity.

e. Try memtool from http://playground.sun.con/pub/memtool (package name =
RMCmem)

f. memstat from www.sun.com/sun-on-net

g. use the /usr/proc/bin/pmap command:

[jed@supernova /dev/pts/8]$ ./pmap $$
25559: /bin/tcsh
00010000 312K read/exec /usr/bin/tcsh
0006C000 40K read/write/exec /usr/bin/tcsh
00076000 200K read/write/exec [ heap ]
FF100000 656K read/exec /usr/lib/libc.so.1
FF1B2000 32K read/write/exec /usr/lib/libc.so.1
 .
 .
 .

As it turned out, for me, /tmp usage was not an issue. The culprit was
apache/httpd. Gracefully restarting apache freed up 250+mb of swap. We're
now looking into memory leaks in apache.

Thanks for everyone's help.

Eric

******************************
Eric Watson
Sr. Systems Administrator
Harvard Law School
617-496-6518
******************************

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