RE: Virtual Memory problems on Informix start up

Paul- Try running swapinfo -at (you must be root), which should show you that about 6 GB of swap space has been reserved. This is because UNIX assumes that at some point it may need to swap any process out of memory. It reserves a spot in the swap space for this purpose for every new process created, equal to the real memory used by the process. Setting RESIDENT 1 or RESIDENT -1 in your onconfig will NOT change this behavior. In other words, what you see IS expected. --EEM > -----Original Message----- > From: asfafa [mailto:asfafa@btinternet.com] > Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 12:16 PM > To: informix-list@iiug.org > Subject: Virtual Memory problems on Informix start up > > Hi All > > I'm hoping someone can explain why this is happening. > > We have Informix 9.3 installed on a Sun box which has 16Gb RAM and 8 > 1.2GHz CPUs. > > We have noticed that informix is starting up strangely - before > informix starts, there is about 13Gb of real memory with 225M of swap > space in use. After informix starts up, about 7Gb of real memory is > left (expected), but swap space in use goes up to 7Gb, which is not > expected. > > Before 'oninit -v' > load averages: 2.11, 3.68, 3.61 > 19:08:12 > 87 processes: 85 sleeping, 2 on cpu > CPU states: 85.5% idle, 12.2% user, 2.3% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% > swap > Memory: 16G real, 13G free, 151M swap in use, 25G swap free > > After 'oninit -v' > load averages: 1.79, 3.28, 3.47 > 19:09:15 > 116 processes: 113 sleeping, 3 on cpu > CPU states: 65.8% idle, 18.2% user, 15.9% kernel, 0.1% iowait, 0.0% > swap > Memory: 16G real, 7345M free, 6632M swap in use, 19G swap free > > > Why is this happening? Is there a misconfiguration in the kernel > parameter settings or in the onconfig? Why should it use swap space > first? > > Any advice greatly appreciated, as I am totally flummoxed! > > > tia > > paul sending to informix-list