It is common for virtual memory OSes (like Solaris) to save some least used
memory pages to swap file (so-called paging--not swapping) and this is what
you observed. I no longer use Solaris 10 but for ZFS cache it prefers to
page in order to satisfy as big ZFS cache as possible. Maybe you want to
decrease ZFS cache... Sorry do not know how, but Google will help.

2009/9/1 Andreas Höschler <[email protected]>

> Hi all,
>
> we encounter problems from time to time while starting vbox instances or
> running virtual boxes simply die for know obvious reason. For quite a while
> I had no idea why, until other processes on this Solaris box  send out a
> "Virtual Memory exhausted" messages. This made be checking swap space. I am
> used to the following:
>
> -bash-3.00# swap -s
> total: 177032k bytes allocated + 29072k reserved = 206104k used, 2195552k
> available
>
> meaning almost nothing used and almost everything available. However, on
> all machines that are running vbox sessions it's the opposite!?
>
> bash-3.00$ swap -s
> total: 19745968k bytes allocated + 2594724k reserved = 22340692k used,
> 727592k available
>
> 19GB allocated??
>
>  PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
>  26490 root     3068M 3053M cpu7    21    0 233:30:38 7.2% VBoxHeadless/15
>  12108 root     2177M 2155M sleep   49    0  36:23:23 0.3% VirtualBox/15
>  29377 root     2171M 2165M sleep   59    0 514:01:49 5.5% VBoxHeadless/15
>  17073 jwasjuta 2082M 2072M sleep   59    0   0:06:52 0.0%
> SOObjectBrowser/1
>  24046 root     1629M 1624M sleep   59    0   0:07:55 2.9% VBoxHeadless/17
>  3645 root     1140M 1135M sleep   59    0 215:38:37 1.4% VBoxHeadless/16
>   996 ttaserv  1111M  258M sleep   59    0   1:07:35 0.0% java/115
>  3658 root      599M  584M sleep   59    0  74:03:03 0.4% VBoxHeadless/16
>  11904 ahoesch   504M  493M sleep   59    0   0:00:35 0.0% OSMMapServer/207
>  2036 utwww     277M  221M sleep   59    0   0:59:53 0.0% java/72
>  25339 root      267M  263M sleep   59    0   3:49:23 4.0% FrontBase/31
>  11991 cboed     239M  224M sleep   59    0   0:02:26 0.0%
> SOObjectBrowser/35
>  5380 nuran     216M  205M sleep   59    0   0:02:21 0.1%
> SOObjectBrowser/128
>  12929 jung      208M  192M sleep   59    0   0:03:39 0.4%
> SOObjectBrowser/45
>  18420 luehr     207M  155M sleep   49    0   0:12:17 0.0% soffice.bin/5
>  23459 cordes    200M  176M sleep   49    0   0:02:23 0.1%
> SOObjectBrowser/117
>  18713 ttasys    183M  124M sleep   59    0   1:45:10 0.0% java/183
>  3674 suerie    179M  163M sleep   49    0   0:01:42 0.1%
> SOObjectBrowser/58
>  10458 luehr     169M  117M sleep   49    0   0:00:19 0.0% soffice.bin/5
>  3533 suerie    162M  101M sleep   59    0   0:02:08 0.3% soffice.bin/5
>
> This prstat output shows that approximately 16GB of memory are in use. But
> this machine has 64GB RAM. How can it be that this machine uses 22GB swap??
>
> I did
>
>        zfs create -V 10gb rpool/swap2
>        /usr/sbin/swap -a /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap2
>
> and this seems to help for now, but I don't want a machine with 64GB RAM to
> swap.
>
> -bash-3.00# prtconf -v | grep Memory
> Memory size: 65536 Megabytes
>
> Any idea? What am I missing?
>
> Thanks a lot,
>
>  Andreas
>
>
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