Learn the basics for managing application memory on Solaris and resolving common memory usage problems in a Sun Developer Network article by Xinfeng Liu. His article discusses how to observe memory usage on Solaris, how application memory is laid out on Solaris, and how to use the libumem memory allocator to improve memory allocation efficiency.

Liu notes that his article does not tackle debugging core dumps from incorrectly referenced memory and debugging memory leaks.

What he does offer is an examination of the Solaris system memory, explaining memory usage at the system level, including physical memory, swap, and tmpfs.

Liu also addresses application memory. He begins with a brief discussion on address space with examples of Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC. He then introduces the pmap tool, which displays information about the address space of a process. An example of a process on Solaris SPARC is used.

Other areas of application memory covered in the article include application threads and stack size, and application memory allocators Libc and Libumem.

Overall, Liu writes that application memory management on Solaris can assist application developers in determining and understanding when a system is running low on memory, and how to deal with some of the probable causes.

More Information

Solaris Application Memory Management - Liu's SDN article

Understanding Memory Allocation and File System Caching in OpenSolaris - Richard McDougall's blog

A Comparison of Memory Allocators in Multiprocessors [...read more...]

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