Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Memory Usage and Sizing Tools

There are four primary consumers of memory: the kernel, processes, filesystem caches, and System V shared memory. Kernel memory usage is described in “Kernel Memory Allocation” on page 365. Process memory usage is described in “Process Memory Usage Information” on page 421. Filesystem caches invisibly consume large amounts of memory; there are no measurements of this usage in Solaris 2. System V Shared Memory can be observed by means of the ipcs command.

The Solaris Memory System is a white paper available via http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance.html, written by my colleague Richard McDougall. It explains how to measure and size memory usage. Richard has also written a loadable kernel module that instruments ...