Swap space keeps changing
Carlos Vazquez
changing size (using Solaris 2.6) from like 24 KB to a few MB's. Can
anyone tell me what could be causing this and how I can make it stable
again at a resonable size. The only thing I can see that may have
caused it was I had a file in there that completely filled up the /tmp
drive overnight that I erased as soon as I noticed it. Could this
confuse Solaris somehow. Another thing that has popped up is a group of
files that start with 'crout', some which are up to 5 MB. Also my swap
space should be about 300 MB and when I run top it tells me
79M swap in use, 222M swap free
But df -k tells me
swap 2104 24 2080 2% /tmp
Thanks to anyway who knows how to solve this.
--
____________________________
Carlos Vazquez
www.locateadoc.com
www.mojointeractive.com
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Neil W Rickert
> All of a sudden today my swap space (/tmp) has been constantly
>changing size (using Solaris 2.6) from like 24 KB to a few MB's. Can
>anyone tell me what could be causing this and how I can make it stable
>again at a resonable size. The only thing I can see that may have
>caused it was I had a file in there that completely filled up the /tmp
>drive overnight that I erased as soon as I noticed it. Could this
>confuse Solaris somehow. Another thing that has popped up is a group of
>files that start with 'crout', some which are up to 5 MB. Also my swap
>space should be about 300 MB and when I run top it tells me
>79M swap in use, 222M swap free
>But df -k tells me
>swap 2104 24 2080 2% /tmp
'/tmp' is not your swap space. Rather, '/tmp' is a file system in
your swap space. The swap space is also used by programs. It is
call 'swap' space, because when the system runs short on memory, it
transfers part of memory content to swap space (swaps memory to
disk).
You probably have some programs running that are using lots of
virtual memory, and thus consuming most of swap.
Michael Belanger
my $.02
-M
Carlos Vazquez wrote:
> files that start with 'crout', some which are up to 5 MB. Also my swap
> space should be about 300 MB and when I run top it tells me
> 79M swap in use, 222M swap free
>
> But df -k tells me
> swap 2104 24 2080 2% /tmp
Carlos Vazquez
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
swap 146784 96 146688 1% /tmp
But your right about lots of programs running. I did a ps -eaf and
found that I have about 100 old processes on there that haven't died in
about 3 days, all of which where run by a cron job. So I tried to kill
most of them, first with kill and then kill -9. But about 20 of them
are still hanging around and the person who spawned them was root. Also
probably a related problem my cron jobs won't run anymore. I did a cron
stop and then cron start and they still won't run. Thanks for any help
anyone.
In article <7rrn69$h...@ux.cs.niu.edu>,
Neil W Rickert <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> Carlos Vazquez <car...@mojointeractive.com> writes:
>
> > All of a sudden today my swap space (/tmp) has been constantly
> >changing size (using Solaris 2.6) from like 24 KB to a few MB's. Can
> >anyone tell me what could be causing this and how I can make it
stable
> >again at a resonable size. The only thing I can see that may have
> >caused it was I had a file in there that completely filled up
the /tmp
> >drive overnight that I erased as soon as I noticed it. Could this
> >confuse Solaris somehow. Another thing that has popped up is a group
of
> >files that start with 'crout', some which are up to 5 MB. Also my
swap
> >space should be about 300 MB and when I run top it tells me
> >79M swap in use, 222M swap free
>
> >But df -k tells me
> >swap 2104 24 2080 2% /tmp
>
> '/tmp' is not your swap space. Rather, '/tmp' is a file system in
> your swap space. The swap space is also used by programs. It is
> call 'swap' space, because when the system runs short on memory, it
> transfers part of memory content to swap space (swaps memory to
> disk).
>
> You probably have some programs running that are using lots of
> virtual memory, and thus consuming most of swap.
>
>
--
Chris Thompson
Carlos Vazquez <car...@mojointeractive.com> wrote:
>If /tmp is not my swap space then why when I type df -k it tells me
>
>Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
>swap 146784 96 146688 1% /tmp
When you see
$ df -k /usr
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t2d0s3 504678 386233 67978 86% /usr
do you say "ah, that means disk slice c0t2d0s3 is in /usr"? No, you know
that it means /usr is mounted from a filing system inside the disk slice.
So when you see
$ df -k /tmp
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
swap 262144 5036 257108 2% /tmp
you should realise that it means that /tmp is in "swap", not that "swap"
in /tmp.
This confusion comes up with monotonous regularity on this newsgroup.
"/usr/sbin/swap -l" will tell you where your swap space really is, in
terms of disk slices and/or files, if you have any in addition to real
memory.
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk