How/What do I tell users when they say the sys is low on memory?

[scb]

Similar to a previous post, but different...

Our programmers are running top, sar, and
vmstat and are seeing that only 65 megs out
of 2 gigs are free, even when there's hardly
anything running on the system. I know that
can't be taken at face value since it's some
kind of high/low water mark (too new to
Solaris to know what I'm talking about!), but
what do I tell them to reassure them that the
numbers they see don't mean that the system
is low on memory?

Thanks,
SCB

 

[dobbyn]

If you are on Solaris 7 or prior, the system uses memory for file system cache, and the reporting tools (like vmstat) won't give you an accurate picture of how much is really being used by applications.

If you go to ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/memtool, (at least I think that's the right place) you can download a utility called "prtmem" that will give a more accurate picture.