Oracle Solaris Containers - Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials - page 207

amounts of memory is a sign of a problem. In that situation, the Container is using
more RAM than you expected, either because there is a problem with the workload
or because you chose a value that is too low for normal operations.
If you didn't use the resource capping feature, you can still get a reasonable estimate
of memory consumption per Container with prstat as shown in earlier examples.
Another Solaris command that can report information on a per processor set
basis is vmstat . The default output reports basic paging activity, which is col-
lected separately for each processor set. If you run vmstat in a Container, the
paging activity reported is that of the processors in the Container's processor set.
The -p option to vmstat reports details of paging activity. When that option is
used with vmstat in a Container that is running in a processor set, the paging
activity information reported is that of the Container's processors.
An even better tool for providing visibility into per-Container paging is zvm-
stat , a tool in the DTrace Toolkit. Its output provides similar information to the
vmstat command, but the data is aggregated per Container. The DTrace Toolkit
can be found at opensolaris.org .
GZ# zvmstat 3
ZONE re mf fr sr epi epo epf api apo apf fpi fpo fpf
global 43 431 1766 16760 65 0 678 0 378 378 1 4 710
myzone2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
myzone2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
ZONE re mf fr sr epi epo epf api apo apf fpi fpo fpf
global 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 4
myzone2 25 276 0 0 5 0 0 45 0 0 57 0 0
myzone2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
ZONE re mf fr sr epi epo epf api apo apf fpi fpo fpf
global 0 1 12 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 12 12
myzone2 1 17 0 0 0 0 0 10 0 0 0 0 0
myzone2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Shared Memory and Locked Memory Tools Some applications use shared memory
so that multiple processes can access one set of data. For example, database
software uses shared memory to store table indexes. Database performance will
be severely affected if that data is paged out to disk. When applications use shared
memory pages via Solaris ISM (Intimate Shared Memory) or DISM (Dynamic
ISM), those memory pages are locked into memory and cannot be paged out by the
operating system.
Overly aggressive software could use more shared memory than is appropriate.
Also, this functionality could be used to craft a denial-of-service attack. Although