Hello peers,

I am currently having an issue with a v480r box that is thrashing because of a memory leak in an app. Can't determine fully which app is causing the leak but we are looking for ways to mediate the issue by preventing the app from crashing the box. My question is if I implement a resource memory cap on this 8GB system to lets say all processes from xuser can only consume up to 6GB of ram the system will still thrash after using up the 6GB right? Since after the 6GB is used up rcap daemon will start utilizing swap as usual right? So I am confused as what other admins would do in this situation. Would you cap swap usage? I think this makes no sense because then the app will crash either way after it runs out of memory and cannot utilize swap. The only fix I can assume is right is to fix the leaking app. But how would we allow the app to leak but not bring the system to a thrashing halt?

Thanks

What Solaris release/update are you using ? What prevents you to identify the faulty application ?

You can limit the (virtual) memory used by a process by using the "ulimit -v" command. If you set a limit lower enough than the RAM size, other processes shouldn't be affected and the one leaking memory will eventually crash.