[mrtg] Re: Solaris Related Problems Off topic post - sorry

[Leif Neland]

On Wed, 28 Jul 1999, Charles Gillanders wrote:

> Hi this is an off topic post, sorry but I have no idea where else to ask.
> 
> I'm successfully using MRTG and the UCD snmp libs  monitor disk space,
> processor usage and free real and virtual memory on a solaris 2.6 system.
> MRTG works great - thanks Tobias for a great little tool.
> 
> It's what mrtg shows up that has me worried, the real memory free very
> quickly falls from near 500Mb (the box has 512Mb in it) to just about 7 - 8
> Mb.  If I run top on the system and sort everything by size rather than cpu,
> I can count up all the memory that the various processess are using, guess
> what it doesn't add up to anywhere near 500Mb, more like a 100 or so.
> 
> So my question(s) is(are) where has my memory gone and should I be worried?
> Does anyone else monitor similar stats with a sun and notice similar
> results?  Does anyone have any pointers for mailing lists / web sites /
> usenet groups etc. that might be able to advise?
> 

Really the only time you should have much free memory, is on a machine
which never does anything, or just after boot.

If the kernel is doing its job properly, it tries to use all available
memory for disk buffers (cache) (and other stuff).

When a program really needs memory, the kernel just discards diskbuffers,
containing stuff already on disk.

What you really should be monitoring is swap space and swap-in/out.

Leif
 

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