Memory Utilization

One of the hardest bottlenecks to identify is insufficient physical memory. SarCheck will know that a shortage of memory is easily detected on a Solaris 8 system by looking at the scan rate.

On older versions of Solaris, other statistics such as the relationship between the amount of free memory and the value of lotsfree need to be considered.

At least 3.0 percent of the system's memory, or 1.89 megabytes, was always unused during sar sampling. The value of lotsfree was 114 pages, or 0.89 megabytes of memory. This indicates that while the system is not in need of memory, there isn't an unusually large quantity of physical memory that remains unused. Please note that this value is not a true high-water mark of memory usage and only reflects what was happening when sar sampled system activity.

Graph of megabytes of free memory remaining

The average page scanning rate was 0.55 per second. Page scanning peaked at 7.54 per second from 09:40:00 to 10:00:00. Peak resource utilization statistics can be used to help understand performance problems. If performance was worst during the period of high scanning activity, then a performance bottleneck may be caused by heavy I/O or the lack of memory available.