SUMMARY: Solaris 9 RAM and SWAP usage

Solaris makes no distinction between swap and RAM when
allocating address space for a process. The memory
management unit will take care of swap space when the time
comes for paging or swapping. As for addressing one part of
my original question. Top's SWAP space should be relabeled
as total virtual memory.

Sorry for the late summary. But anyhow, giving thanks to
those who helped me on this question and no thanks to the
individual who attempted to chastise me for asking by saying
it was covered in the FAQ (when in fact it I saw only brief
coverage)

For more information see:

ml

ml

question:
We have a Sun V1280 w/ 12 CPU's and 24G or RAM. It has
Solaris 9 release 9/04 (s9s_u7wos_09 SPARC). I was looking
at the system via the top utility and I was wondering about
a RAM usage. I don't think it's using RAM very wisely and
I wanted to get some opinions by some of the folks on this
list. The system is running and the HR application
Peoplesoft. It has several instances of both of them. The
top command's output is listed below.
>
The big question that I have is: Why would it be using 13G
of SWAP, when it has about 8.5 G of RAM free? Any
thoughts? Any references on docs that will explain memory
management on Solaris better? even a better utility
than top.

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