SWAP file decrementing towards zero

[Guest_imported]

Hello all,

I have a Mail server running Solaris 8, and recently we've been having the swap files, /var/run and /tmp decrementing from about 1.3GB respectively o somewhere in the vicinity of 3MB. We rebooted once, and the space were reclaimed, just a couple of days later we are back to the same scenerio.
Below is the output of df -k
Does anyone have a suggestion why this is occuring., and what could be done to stop this. This was never the case before now, and I was wondering what could be eating up the swap space (matter of fact i never knew it could even decrement)

Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 133255 72490 47440 61% /
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 1051335 805715 182540 82% /usr
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5 476623 362531 66430 85% /var
swap 7328 0 7328 0% /var/run
swap 7344 16 7328 1% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 264319 203229 34659 86% /opt
/dev/md/dsk/d17 17402262 9983320 7244920 58% /export/home

Thank you

 

[dobbyn]

It's normal for the swap space to change over time. It sounds like you are simply running out of swap space. The command "swap -s" will give you some additional information about your swap, and you can add additional swap (if you have free disk) with "swap -a". You've probably got applications running that are using all your current space.

 

[Guest_imported]

This output looks as though there is only 7 MB of swap space allocated. Definitely use the swap -s command that dobby mentioned. Have you checked your /var/adm/messages for any errors especially relating to memory? Have you lost any physical memory recently? You might want to check and see you have what you are suppose to.

 

[mikeclark]

Check /tmp (which uses swap space ) this might be filling up with files that arn't being cleared.
Another thing I have had before, permissions somehow changed on the swap command so the system wasn't using the swap space that was allocated. Permissions should be 555 for /usr/sbin/swap.