SUMMARY: what's chewing up the swap space?

From: ert weerr (sun1sol@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jan 12 2005 - 17:47:48 EST


>Is that possible to check what applications are
>sitting in the swap and not releasing the used
>swap area?
>We have an old box what we shouldn't reboot, but a
>badly written application always chewing up the free
>swap space.
>We need to identify this application and kill
>it if it's possible.

I received a lot of useful solutions for my original
question.
Thanks to everyone who spent time to reply for my
email!

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You can do /usr/ucb/ps -alxww and then check out the
processes that have a large SZ.

----------------------------------------

ps -ef or prstat will show the amount of memory (real

& virtual) used by a process. if the memory used by a

process grows other time, it is your memory-leaker.

----------------------------------------

ps -elf shows a SZ column which is the size of the
process in pages.
Multiple that by the output of page size to find the
total size of the processes in bytes. pmap -S <pid>
will show the swap reservation of a process if you're
running under Solaris 9.

----------------------------------------

prstat -s size

also check for files in (or applications writing logs
into) /tmp

----------------------------------------

"ps -el" should show a large SZ for the offending
process (remember SZ is in pages, so its a lot bigger
than it looks). Solaris 8 has "ps -eyl" which shows
SZ
in kilobytes. Once you find a large process, you can
use tools in /usr/proc/bin to learn more about it,
or just watch it for a while to see if it grows.

Also run lsof on /tmp. It could be some process is
writing big files there. Since /tmp is a memory file
system, that can chew up a ton of swap space.

----------------------------------------

"lsof" can be used to view open files in tmp/swap with
a link count of 0 (zero).

Thanks!

John

                
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