May 31, 2016

Actual Memory monitoring in AIX systems

Many AIX users are facing troubles during actual memory usage in IBM servers. But the below simple calculation may reduce your doubts.

The command svmon -G can be used to determine the actual memory consumption of a server. To determine if the memory is over-committed, you need to divide the memory-virtual value by the memory-size value, e.g.:

bash-4.2# svmon -G
               size       inuse        free         pin     virtual   mmode
memory      8388608     8357353       31255     1831582     6924332     Ded
pg space    4325376       29713

               work        pers        clnt       other
pin         1577710           0           0      253872
in use      6924332           5     1433016

PageSize   PoolSize       inuse        pgsp         pin     virtual
s    4 KB         -     2981497       29713      337742     1548476
m   64 KB         -      335991           0       93365      335991
bash-4.2# 

In this example, the memory-virtual value is 6924332, and the memory-size value is 5079040. Note that the actual memory-inuse (8388608) is nearly the same as the memory-size (5079040) value. This is simply AIX caching as much as possible in its memory. Hence, the memory-free value is typically very low, 31255 in the example above. As such, determining the memory size based on the memory-free value does not provide a good interpretation of the actual memory consumption, as memory typically includes a lot of cached data.

Now, to determine the actual memory consumption, divide memory-virtual by memory-size:

# bc
scale=2
6924332/8388608
.82


Thus, the actual memory consumption is 82% of the memory. The size of the memory is 8388608 blocks of 4 KB = 2097152 MB. The free memory is thus: (100% - 82%) * 2097152 MB = 37748736 MB.

Try to keep the value of memory consumption less than 90%. Above that, you will generally start seeing paging activity using the vmstat command. By that time, it is a good idea to lower the load on the system or to get more memory in your system.

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