[OpenIndiana-discuss] Memory usage concern

[Jason Matthews]

> It seems the memory is going to the kernel.


I have this problem on my web proxy tier, but not on my backend systems.

I have checked kernel core dumps for memory leaks, switched the Ethernet
cards/drivers, tested exclusive versus shared interfaces on the zones, and
tweaked everything I could think of. I haven't found a solution. I run the
same motherboard every where and I only have this issue on the proxy tier.

I put 96gb of ram in one box and watched the system consume it all.
Ultimately, I increased the RAM across the board to push the reboot cycle
out a couple of weeks. My longer term plan is to develop the software stack
on Linux and migrate the proxy tier to CentOS. 

It sickens me that we can't get this right, but if Linux is the best tool
for the job then that's what I will use. Fortunately, the data tier doesn't
suffer from this problem and that's where we really need the data handling
capabilities of ZFS.

My hardware platform on the web tier is Intel SR2625URLX, LSI 9211-8i,
Crucial M4s for storage. The primary application running is nginx. I have
nearly no writes to disk. We have such a fire hose of http traffic that we
cannot possibly write logs on the proxy tier.

By the way, it is nice to find you. James Carlson insisted I was the only
one having this problem ;-)

j.

root at www003:~# for i in `seq 1 5`; do date; echo ::memstat |mdb -k |egrep
"Kernel|MB"; sleep 120; done
October 15, 2012 03:32:37 PM PDT
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
Kernel                    3659602             14295   44%
October 15, 2012 03:34:39 PM PDT
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
Kernel                    3660353             14298   44%
October 15, 2012 03:36:41 PM PDT
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
Kernel                    3661008             14300   44%
October 15, 2012 03:38:43 PM PDT
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
Kernel                    3661708             14303   44%
October 15, 2012 03:40:45 PM PDT
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
Kernel                    3662362             14306   44%