Paging Space utilization increasing

[Marv72]

We have a p630 with 3GB RAM (3GB paging space) running AIX 5.1 ML3 and Oracle 9i. The paging space utilisation is slowly creeping up, currently at 73%, growing 10% every 2 months.

We run svmon -P regularly to identify process memory utilsation. This has shown that tivoli monitoring agent is leaking, but not by as much as the paging space is increasing.

My questions are:

What do people use to identify total memory utilisation?

I have considered using SARcheck and ZFTrace, has anyone used these tools, and are they useful?

The best way I know to free up paging space is to re-boot, is there a slightly less disruptive way?

cheers

Martin

 

[lillracksingen]

Shut down and restart the application that's eating up you paging space.
Since you're running Oracle 9 then you may be suffering from the memory leak in libperfstat mentioned in APAR IY55914.
We had the same problem in AIX 5.2 with Oracle 9. The corresponding APAR for AIX 5.2 is IY52935. We got the PTF and the problem was solved. There's no PTF available for IY55914 yet as the APAR was opened only a few weeks ago.

 

[MoshiachNow]

Also,

acn check for zombies:

ps –auw | grep defunct

This shows zombies processes (to kill – reboot or kill the parent)

"Long live king Moshiach !"

http://www.7for70.com/

 

[sbix]

Oh no levw ... NOT FROM YOU!!!!!
zombies processes don't steal memory because they are only an item in the pid table, they create a big problem to Unix when they became a significant number because the OS tries continuously to kill them.
Marv72, the "eating RAM Tivoli client's problem" is a known bug, don't be scared about the PAGING SPACE used and not APPARENTLY released by OS when a process dies, AIX works only when it's needed to do ... so physical disk allocation of old pages of memory referenced in the past from died process is released only when a new process requires some swapping space

 

[MoshiachNow]

Right,sbix
My mistake.

"Long live king Moshiach !"

http://www.7for70.com/