Opensolaris – where has my memory gone?

Use this command in 2008.11 to get details on where your memory is currently being used…

echo ::memstat | pfexec mdb -k

Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
————     —————-  —————-  —-
Kernel                     263992              1031   34%
ZFS File Data               91917               359   12%
Anon                       376867              1472   48%
Exec and libs               11484                44    1%
Page cache                   3387                13    0%
Free (cachelist)             9766                38    1%
Free (freelist)             24807                96    3%

Total                      782220              3055
Physical                   782219              3055

Note: ZFS should eat up the remainder of your ram after a bit of use.

“ZFS File Data” is the one to look at – if it is low then most of your ram may be eaten up in other areas of the system.

From the output above you can see that i have 3GB installed. I have a few VirtualBox VM’s running on my server which show up as “Anon”, they are consuming almost half of my ram.