Swap Space Drained

> We just moved our primary database from 6.4 on SCO to ingres II on Solaris 7
> x86.  The coversion went very well, but it hit the fan later.  The iidbms
> process appears to be draining the swap space.  When we run out of
> swap...crash.
> 
> Top reveals that iimerge, with the pid of the iidbms, just keeps growing,
> even at night when the database is mostly idle (it serves a web site).  This
> is also confirmed with
>  ps -elf | sort -n +9 -10 |tail -22
> 
> How can I stop the iidbms from consuming the swap space?
> 
> Thanks,
> Todd Boewe
> Database Engineering
> www.lioninc.com
> 
> 
> 

From: Martin Bowes 
Subject: Re: iidbms draining swap space

Hi Todd,

    In short - you cant stop iidbms draining swap space. You can throw more
    swap space at the problem - possibly even dynamically.

    How big is your swap area? I have 2G, typically I would be seeing swap
    only 30% used on most platforms (OI 1.2 on DUNIX). I generally get worried
    about the 50% used mark and start hunting for processes to kill off.

    I find ps -uingres -oUFMT is very usefull in determining memory leakage
    and it can be a good guide to who is using the swap area most.
    To measure swap utilisation I run swapon -s and record the output regurly.

    If you have a genuine memory leakage problem then report this to CA. 

    Also check the max-per-proc-data-size setting on your box. 
    Try running a '/sbin/sysconfig -q proc' and check the values of that field
    and max-per-proc-address-space. Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with
    SCO to say if you have such a utility available

    Martin Bowes
Ingres Q & A
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