Re: What can I learn about data that is staying paged out? (There is a more specific poudriere bulk related context given.)

On Sun, Jun 05, 2022 at 03:55:21PM -0700, Mark Millard wrote:
>Thanks for the idea. Know how I could find an approximation
>to the amount of paged out buffer cache to see about how much
>of the ~300 MiBytes it might explain?
>
>Mark
>
>===
>Mark Millard
>marklmi at yahoo.com
>
>

Hi folks,

      I believe what you're looking for is:
      vmstat -o | awk '$7 == "sw" { print $0 }'

      The definition of the 7th column is escaping me right now; I'm
      pretty sure I've seen it in a manual page somewhere, but can't for
      the life of me remember it - so if anyone knows, do tell and I'll
      figure out a way to get it added to vmstat. ;)

      If a lot of lines in vmstat -o are blank, it's usually a good idea
      to have a look at `pstat -f` because it'll either be shared memory
      objects, sockets, pipes, or things like that.

      There's also vmstat -m or vmstat -z which can be useful in breaking
      down types of VM objects by allocator.

      I've also taken the liberty of including `zones.pl` which has been
      floating around FreeBSD circles for ages, and which uses the vmstat
      -z flag mentioned above plus a bit of perl to sum everything up
      nicely.

      This is just what I've picked up over the course of sysadmining,
      I'm by no means a VM expert - as evidenced by the fact that I
      didn't know about sytat -swap, despite using systat regularly, and
      wishing it had a `systat -sensors` page which detailed the
      temperature values that can be found via acpi(4), coretemp(4) and
      occationally others, as well as fan-speed as reported by
      acpi_ibm(4) and others of its kind in /boot/kernel/acpi_*.

Yours,
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen