How did you measure this free real memory and virtual memory? ++ top ++ Memory: 8192M real, 2301M free, 4947M swap in use, ---> 689M swap free Which columns from which tools output? A decent OS shouldn't start paging much before it starts running out of physical memory, but there are few things which could affect this. Solaris zones could be one thing I guess. As solaris /tmp filesystem is usually a in-memory filesystem which can be paged out to pagefile, then maybe this is your issue - check if you got a lot of files in /tmp filesystem. ++ I really didn't see much in /tmp Appreciate the help, Dave Tanel. > -----Original Message----- > From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Turner > Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 23:14 > To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Virtual Memory > > > We have a system with swap less than half the size I would > like, 5 GB swap with 8 GB real. Last week we started to run > out of virtual memory while real memory usage was still low. > There was only 400 MB virtual memory remaining but 2 GB real > memory available. What I'm curious about is if we run out of > virtual memory will the system be affected or will it just > start using more of the real memory. When I asked one person > he said we could still run out of kernel resources and I > asked him to elaborate but haven't heard back. If anyone can > shed light on how the system would handle the situation I > would appreciate it. Also we plan on rebuilding swap with 1.5 > times real memory as a standard. Does anyone else have a > standard they follow for allocating swap? > > We are running on Solaris 2.9. > > Thx, Dave > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l