system completely ran out of swa p space

[ac325ci]

what can you do when the system completely runs out of swap.. no commands can run.. nothing u can fork.. any other solution aside from a hardboot ?

 

[SamBones]

Look in [tt]/tmp[/tt] for something do delete. Depending on your configuration, your swap is probably sharing disk space with [tt]/tmp[/tt].

But, if you can't do an [tt]ls[/tt] or an [tt]rm[/tt], you can't do that.

Hardboot it! Stop-A at the console, then [tt]boot[/tt].

When it's back up, first order of business is to add some swap space. After that, keep an eye on both swap and [tt]/tmp[/tt].

Hope this helps.

 

[ac325ci]

thanks for the quick response.. i guess there's not much we can do aside from rebooting the box ???

 

[elgrandeperro]

The system "saves" a few resources for root on the console,
like a few process slots, etc. And since the text area (execution) is shared, the shell will be in mem.

So sometimes one can login as root (on the console, no su) and issue 1 command. Make it a good one!

gene

 

[daFranze]

You could ether stop processes consuming swapspace (hard to find out, when you can't run many commands) or add some swap with the commands (not sure if these commands will work)

mkfile size /swapfile
swap -a /swapfile

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage

 

[marrow]

Not much you can do, unless you know who's on the system and running what and can kick them off. However you need to make sure it doesn't reoccur and when system is rebooted check your /var/adm/messages,
check /tmp and swap -s
run "vmstat 2 10"
If it looks like swap is low then you can dynamically add using spare diskspace as daFranz recommends