[OpenIndiana-discuss] Memory usage concern

[Heinrich van Riel]

Hello everyone,

I have a question around memory utilization.
Recently we had a system that started to lock up daily and we had to swap
it out with a lab system running 151a5 and Virtualbox.

lab system: 2x AMD 6 core, 32GB Mem. (no KVM support for AMD)
The lab system use to run an Exchange 2010 lab environment all win2008R2
(1x domain controller, 2x DB nodes in DAG, 2x CAS/HUB nodes in an array and
1x Exchange 2007 DB and 1x Exchange 2007 CAS)
The system ran without issues, granted it was not doing much.
Now the system has 2VMs 1x win2008 server running SQL & Sharepoint and
about 10 users connecting and also a windows 2008R2 terminal server not
doing much.

I have 8GB memory allocated to the SQL server and 4GB to the terminal
server in virtualbox.
Since we cannot afford anymore lockups due to the two 2 weeks of issue on
the prod system, I need to keep an eye on things.

My concern is as follow, when I 1st start the system and VMs there is 8GB
of free memory. This number keeps decreasing by about 300MB every 10 hours.

OI - 10GB max allocated to ZFS ARC (only setting change from default
install)
VBOX - No page fusion or ballooning configured.

It seems the memory is going to the kernel.

Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
Kernel                     623041              2433    7%
ZFS File Data             2587928             10109   31%
Anon                        95090               371    1%
Exec and libs                4349                16    0%
Page cache                3184468             12439   38%
Free (cachelist)             9890                38    0%
Free (freelist)           1881628              7350   22%


few hours later

Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
Kernel                     632236              2469    8%
ZFS File Data             2587980             10109   31%
Anon                        94909               370    1%
Exec and libs                4326                16    0%
Page cache                3184462             12439   38%
Free (cachelist)            10378                40    0%
Free (freelist)           1872103              7312   22%


At the current rate there will be no memory free in 10 days.

Am I concerned for no reason?

Any feedback on how stable OI is with Virtualbox would also be appreciated.
I truly do not want to reinstall the windows system for quite some time if
possible since we do not make use of USB.


Thanks,