Debugging vmstat on a busy box

From: Andy Ford (andy.ford@telindus.co.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 28 2005 - 07:08:19 EST


I have a Solaris 2.8 sunfire v120 server with 2GB RAM.

When I run vmstat I am getting a large number of continually swapped out
processes (45 and above). The box is busy with a lot of I/O (mainly to
mySQL).

I had an issue connecting to the box this morning (although this may be
a red herring). The vmstat output shows ....

procs memory page disk faults
cpu
 r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr m0 m1 m4 m5 in sy cs us
sy id
 26 0 45 1112608 97616 148 1072 2880 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 624 28067 1628
62 38 0
 27 1 45 1112584 97688 153 1010 2704 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 666 45610 1903
52 48 0
 30 0 45 1112744 97976 142 1021 1640 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 548 23154 1755
67 33 0
 30 0 45 1112704 98128 139 895 2224 8 8 0 0 0 2 0 2 633 36139 1953
58 42 0

The paging out isn't continuous, I get a burst now and again.

The summary of prstat details ...

 NPROC USERNAME SIZE RSS MEMORY TIME CPU
     1 mysql 38M 9032K 0.9% 0:00.23 37%
    97 root 1381M 692M 70% 0:20.45 12%
    15 nobody 68M 27M 2.8% 0:11.29 0.0%
     1 daemon 2528K 1160K 0.1% 0:00.00 0.0%
Total: 114 processes, 553 lwps, load averages: 28.54, 29.31, 25.83

What is troubling me is the 45 processes that have been swapped out
waiting for I/O.

How do I see which processes these are, are they a problem and how do I
clear them down.

Thanks

Regards

Andy

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