Monitoring RAM and Swap
Examining how much memory is being used and how much is free has always been a source of confusion in the Solaris environment. Usually we can identify a memory shortfall by watching the system swap space usage. Remember that the Solaris operating system starts to use swap space when it runs out of physical memory, and we refer to this as paging. We can watch swap space usage by examining output from the vmstat command. Two indicators of a RAM shortage are the scan rate and swap device activity. Watch the 12th column (sr or scan rate) of information reported by vmstat in conjunction with I/O traffic displayed with the iostat –Pxn command. With the iostat –Pxn command, watch the swap partitions. The r/s and w/s ...
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