Hi all,

Have just been handed a server that apparently now I've to look after. I've given it a once over and it keeps running out of paging space. Now it has 8GB of RAM in there but it is running some very high usage (from a memory point of view) java processes.

The paging space is set to 1.5 gb which is far too low. Even at that its set incorrectly, it seems to have 512mb in hd6 and 1gb in paging00.

I've checked the PP's and sizings and the problem is that I can add any more paging space. Any time I do I get the following error:

There are not enough free partitions or not enough physical volumes
to keep strictness and satisfy allocation requests. The command
should be retried with different allocation characteristics.

It's AIX 5.3 and my aix skills are very limited. I've plenty of free disk space so can anyone give any ideas of how I may be able to use some of that free disk space and reassign as paging space?

How much *unallocated* space is there? The "Free PPs" line in "lsvg rootvg" (or another VG if you have more than rootvg - see plain "lsvg"). If there's no unallocated space you can't add more paging space. If that's true, but you DO have allocated-but-unused space on a partition (free space according to "df") AND the partition's filesystem is JFS2 (which I believe is default in AIX 5.3), you CAN shrink a partition with "chfs -a size=-1G /partition", Then you can try adding 1GB swap again.

If this is an LPAR, log in to the HMC (or IVM console) and see if the physical machine has RAM available to add to the LPAR, and if so, add it then shut down and re-boot the LPAR.

Adding swap space is like a Hello Kitty band-aid on a broken heart: may help a little, but is attacking the symptoms and not the cause. Swapping to disk is tons slower than RAM, so when you run out of RAM your performance slows to a crawl, and adding more *may* prevent it from running out of memory, but more swap will probably only prolong its demise. I would try to reduce the memory usage on this system, starting with whatever its users are doing to use so much RAM (AIX doesn't use that much by itself!)

Thank you very much. That helped and did the trick.

The proper answer would be to minimize the amount of memory being used be the processes but unfortunately given their nature they are beasts when it comes to memory usage and there is nothing we can do about them.

Or (if possible) add more RAM to the computer.