How much paging space is needed?
You can use these commands to determine how much paging space is being used on your system:
- lsps
- Gives a snapshot of the system at the time the command is issued.
- topas
- Shows how page space changes over the life of a process while a program is running.
This command has a column marked
PAGING SPACE. - svmon
- Shows memory and paging space in use when you specify
-G interval. The values are given in page frames. Each page frame is 4096 bytes. You can enter the svmon command once or with a time interval to monitor how paging and memory are changing.
Note: While the vmstat comand shows paging activity, it does not show clearly how much paging space is being
used.
To determine how much paging space is needed, it is recommended that the paging space should be double the amount of physical memory. So if a system has 1 gigabyte of memory, the total paging space should be 2 gigabytes (although the 2 gigabytegs can be separated onto more than one disk).
On AIX you should consider the following recommendations when configuring your paging space:
- Use the disk or disks that are least utilized.
- Do not allocate more than one paging pa