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From: pauls@css.itd.umich.edu (Paul Southworth)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Swap problems on NetBSD
Date: 18 May 1993 13:13:23 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan ITD Consulting and Support Services
Lines: 43
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1tandj$eo4@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu>
References: <1t99do$2rk@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <1ta5m6$ip5@zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: stimpy.css.itd.umich.edu
In article <1ta5m6$ip5@zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk> lessen@axion.bt.co.uk (Lee Essen) writes:
>Try 'swapinfo -k', this will show you (in k) the amount of swap configured on
>which partitions and how much of it is used.
>
>NetBSD *will* use all the space available in the swap partition (b), so in
>your case it *will* use 75Meg (I wish I could afford to be that extravagent).
Sounds wasteful to me, but if he's actually running out of swap, well...
sounds more like the old swap leak problem, but I haven't encountered that
in NetBSD (and wouldn't expect to).
>I'm not sure what the avm figure is in a vmstat? Perhaps someone could explain
>(I don't have the manual page handy!)
By default, vmstat displays the following information:
memory Information about the usage of virtual and real
memory. Virtual pages (reported in units of 1024
bytes) are considered active if they belong to pro-
cesses which are running or have run in the last 20
seconds.
avm active virtual pages
fre size of the free list
So this doesn't really tell you anything about how much swap space is
available or in use. By contrast, here is vmstat result from a sparc10/41
with 54Mb RAM and over a hundred megs of swap.
stimpy% vmstat
procs memory page disk faults cpu
r b w avm fre re at pi po fr de sr d0 d1 d2 d3 in sy cs us sy id
1 0 0 0 2856 0 26 3 3 0 0 2 2 0 7 1 193 404 82 16 5 78
oh dear! but no, it doesn't mean it has only 2.8Mb of swap recognized by
the system. ;)
My interpretation of this is that no virtual pages are active (there has been
no swapping -- at 9 am there aren't enough big processes running to make it
swap at all). The man page doesn't explain the "free list" but I assume
(comparing it to results from "top") that it's a reflection of the amount
of real memory left.