William L. Maltby wrote:
Regardless of that, it sounds like your situation indicates a need to run SAR. Turn on your system accounting collection and the reports will let you see exactly what's happening with memory, swap, HD, ... and when. I presume that these are as good or better than the old UNIX ones I remember.
Once you have the bullets, I'm not sure what you might shoot, but you ought to kill *something* just for the aggravation you've been caused! ;-)
Bill,
After running sar, I'm not sure I'm confused as I was. I tend to think sar might be correct in what it records and sees. Looking at memory usage and swap, I find the system *is* using all of the available memory, especially at 0420, most likely when the updatedb and slocate crons run. % memory used is averaging 94.26% and swap peaked at about 21%, which sort of relates to the 221mb shown by free this morning. When the machine is quiescent as it gets, mem usage drops to 72% and swap drops to 0.20 %, again, which corresponds with what is reported by free and the system monitor applet. To make a long story short, the machine apparetly does need the swap at times, and while it's not using much during model run time, the cron jobs do turn it loose!
Sar can report *alot* of things, and I suspect I'll be using it more to see if there is anything I can do to tweak the thing to get a bit more performance out of it. Bad enough that it takes so long for my jobs to run, but the number crunching the model does IS pretty tough on things I suppose. Guess we've beat up the swap thing enough.. I'll try to learn more about how to use the additional info at my disposal now.
Sam