Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Managing Disks and Files
Managing Swap and Dump
Chapter 6 665
NOTE To get the total amount of swap space being used, run
swapinfo -ta
If the total percentage used is high, roughly 90% or greater, then you
probably need to add more swap space.
Once you know or suspect that you will have to increase (or decrease)
your swap space, you should estimate your swap space requirements.
The following section describes one method.
You can estimate the amount of swap space you need by adding the space
required by the applications you expect to run on your system to the
amount of physical memory you have.
If you do not know the amount of physical memory on your system, you
can get this information by running sam. From SAM’s main screen, select
“Performance Monitors” and then “System Properties”. Finally, click
on the Memory button. You will find an entry listing Physical Memory.
NOTE If your HP-UX 10.x system is pre-10.20, you can get this information by
checking the file /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log or
/var/adm/syslog/OLDsyslog.log.
You also get this information from your console whenever your system is
booted; look on the line beginning real mem =.
Divide any value of physical memory which is in KB by 1024 to obtain its
value in MB.
Or, if your system currently has sufficient swap space, then you can
increase swap space levels to accommodate new applications.
Use the following worksheet to estimate the size needed for your swap
space. Remember, 1KB = 1024 bytes.
Local Swap Space Needs For standalone (a server or otherwise) and
client systems that will swap to local swap space either to a device or a
file system, you can estimate your swap space needs as follows: