Managers, OSF Gurus,
I am a 7 week veteran of OSF/1, having previously been submerged in SunOS and Solaris Sys. Admin. I have noticed, among other differences, that OSF is, relative to SunOS and Solaris, a
swap hog. I have two or three servers here that whine about being below 10% free on swap.
After some preliminary poking around and man page reading, I have learned that there are two
methods that swap can use: immediate and deferred. Immediate preallocates swap space per
job and deferred uses swap-on-demand when it needs to for just the amount of disk storage it
needs. Immediate is the default , but deferred will tie up less space. I can only assume that
the immediate swap method is causing the warning messages to be sent, since my free swap
space based on reserved falls below 10%, but my actual free is usally about 15-25% higher.
My question is: Before I install another disk (since I'm running DU 3.0 and it doesn't support
file swaps, only block devices), should I switch over to deferred swap by moving my /sbin/swapdefault link and rebooting ?? My current swap space is twice that of memory (256MB).
Any good suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
Wayne Sweatt
Unix System Administrator
NM Dept. of Pub. Safety
Litton/PRC Inc.
Received on Fri Jan 24 1997 - 20:02:17 NZDT