Comprehensive methods of viewing memory usage on Solaris

Question

On Linux, the "top" command shows a detailed but high level overview of your memory usage, showing:

Total Memory, Used Memory, Free Memory, Buffer Usage, Cache Usage, Swap size and Swap Usage.

My question is, what commands are available to show these memory usage figures in a clear and simple way? Bonus points if they're present in the "Core" install of Solaris. 'sar' doesn't count :)

Answer 1

Here are the basics. I'm not sure that any of these count as "clear and simple" though.

ps(1)

For process-level view:

$ ps -opid,vsz,rss,osz,args
  PID  VSZ  RSS   SZ COMMAND
 1831 1776 1008  222 ps -opid,vsz,rss,osz,args
 1782 3464 2504  433 -bash
$

vsz/VSZ: total virtual process size (kb)

rss/RSS: resident set size (kb, may be inaccurate(!), see man)

osz/SZ: total size in memory (pages)

To compute byte size from pages:

$ sz_pages=$(ps -o osz -p $pid | grep -v SZ )
$ sz_bytes=$(( $sz_pages * $(pagesize) ))
$ sz_mbytes=$(( $sz_bytes / ( 1024 * 1024 ) ))
$ echo "$pid OSZ=$sz_mbytes MB"

vmstat(1M)

$ vmstat 5 5 
 kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
 r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr rm s3 -- --   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0 0 0 535832 219880  1   2  0  0  0  0  0 -0  0  0  0  402   19   97  0  1 99
 0 0 0 514376 203648  1   4  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  402   19   96  0  1 99
^C

prstat(1M)

   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP       
  1852 martin   4840K 3600K cpu0    59    0   0:00:00 0.3% prstat/1
  1780 martin   9384K 2920K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% sshd/1
  ...

swap(1)

"Long listing" and "summary" modes:

$ swap -l
swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
/dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap 256,1      16 1048560 1048560
$ swap -s 
total: 42352k bytes allocated + 20192k reserved = 62544k used, 607672k available
$

top(1)

An older version (3.51) is available on the Solaris companion CD from Sun, with the disclaimer that this is "Community (not Sun) supported". More recent binary packages available from sunfreeware.com or blastwave.org.

load averages:  0.02,  0.00,  0.00;                      up 2+12:31:38                                                                                            08:53:58
31 processes: 30 sleeping, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 98.0% idle,  0.0% user,  2.0% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0% swap
Memory: 1024M phys mem, 197M free mem, 512M total swap, 512M free swap

   PID USERNAME LWP PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    TIME    CPU COMMAND
  1898 martin     1  54    0 3336K 1808K cpu      0:00  0.96% top
     7 root      11  59    0   10M 7912K sleep    0:09  0.02% svc.startd

sar(1M)

And just what's wrong with sar? :)