How to limit swap usage in Solaris?

Question

I have an Oracle Solaris 11.3 which has 128 GB of Memory (RAM) and 80 GB of Swap.

I want to limit the use of swap space (not its size just the usage).

I know in more modern linux distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOs , ... there is a file under /proc/sys/vm/swappiness which you can edit and change its number from 0 to 100. 0 means less usage and 100 means more usage from swap space. But unfortunately there is no directory in /proc named as sys (either on solaris 10 and 11.3).

For now:
Where should I find /proc/sys or swappiness file? If this file does not exist on solaris How should I limit the use of swap?

PS:
At the moment my memory usage is about 30% but whenever I start a new process it allocates swap to it and does not start the process correctly.

echo "::memstat" | mdb -k result is as follows:

Page Summary                 Pages             Bytes  %Tot   
----------------- ----------------  ----------------  ----   
Kernel                      852964              6.5G    5%   
ZFS Metadata                156226              1.1G    1%   
ZFS File Data              2675261             20.4G   16%   
Anon                       4342304             33.1G   26%   
Exec and libs                 1764             13.7M    0%   
Page cache                   28121            219.6M    0%   
Free (cachelist)             18607            145.3M    0%   
Free (freelist)            8687248             66.2G   52%   
Total                     16777216              128G   

and swap -l result is:

swapfile             dev    swaplo   blocks     free   
/dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap 303,1        16  8388592  8388592

and prstat -Z result is:

ZONEID    NPROC  SWAP   RSS MEMORY      TIME  CPU  ZONE
 0        96     97G    33G    26%  26:29:09  0.3% global

Answer 1

I want to limit the use of swap space (not its size just the usage).

You can not limit swap reservations in Solaris.

Just about every byte of RAM used by a process is guaranteed by Solaris to have some sort of persistent backing store available. (There are some exceptions to that on Solaris, such as some types of shared memory, which do not need swap reservations because they can't be swapped out. Implementations like Oracle database SGAs use these features.)

Memory-maped files, such as executables and shared objects, usually use the actual file on disk as the backing store, and thus don't use swap space at all. Most other memory usages need a backing store. For example, if a process asks the kernel for a 2 GB heap but never actually uses it, that will cause a 2 GB reservation against swap space, because Solaris guarantees that if a process asks for memory, it will get it. There's no OOM killer that kills your database process on your production database server or your web server on your online web server processing customer orders...

On Solaris, if you ask for memory and the kernel says you can have it, you get it. Even if you don't actually use it until after a long, long period of time. That means if you ask for it, the kernel has to make sure there's a place to put it if it has to be swapped out in the future for any reason.

There's a cost to running under a "I said you can have this memory, and that means you WILL be able to access it no matter what" paradigm instead of a "I said you can have this memory but I lied to you and now that you've tried to use it I'm going to kill you" paradigm, and that cost is what might seem like exorbitant swap usage.

To see the swap usage of a process, you can use the pmap -S command:

bash-4.1$ pmap -S $$
4622:   /usr/bin/bash
         Address     Kbytes       Swap Mode Mapped File
0000000000400000       1412          - r-x----  bash
0000000000571000         40         40 rw-----  bash
000000000057B000         24         24 rw-----  bash
0000000EC09E6000        236        236 rw-----    [ heap ]
00007FF0C8590000        304          - r-x----  libcurses.so.1
00007FF0C85EC000         20         20 rw-----  libcurses.so.1
00007FF0C85F1000         16         16 rw-----  libcurses.so.1
00007FF0C8600000       6756          - r-x----  en_US.UTF-8.so.3
00007FF0C8CA9000          8          8 rw-----  en_US.UTF-8.so.3
00007FF0C8CD0000         32          - r-x----  libgen.so.1
00007FF0C8CE8000          4          4 rw-----  libgen.so.1
00007FF0C8CF0000         64         64 rwx----    [ anon ]
00007FF0C8D10000         64         64 rwx----    [ anon ]
00007FF0C8D2D000          4          - rwxs---    [ anon ]
00007FF0C8D30000         64          - r-x----  methods_unicode.so.3
00007FF0C8D40000          4          4 rw-----  methods_unicode.so.3
00007FF0C8D50000         24         24 rwx----    [ anon ]
00007FF0C8D60000       1816          - r-x----  libc.so.1
00007FF0C8F36000         68         68 rw-----  libc.so.1
00007FF0C8F47000          8          8 rw-----  libc.so.1
00007FF0C8F50000         64         64 rw-----    [ anon ]
00007FF0C8F6C000        352          - r-x----  ld.so.1
00007FF0C8FD4000         16         16 rwx----  ld.so.1
00007FF0C8FD8000          4          4 rwx----  ld.so.1
FFFF80E6271AF000         20         20 rw-----    [ stack ]
---------------- ---------- ----------
        total Kb      11424        684

Note this line:

0000000000400000       1412          - r-x----  bash

The Swap column indicates that particular memory mapping requires no swap usage at all. That's the part of the bash executable that's backed by the on-disk /usr/bin/bash file itself.

But this line:

0000000000571000         40         40 rw-----  bash

uses 40 kb of swap. It's likely a data segment mapped from /usr/bin/bash, but since it's modifiable data (note the rw permissions), the backing store can't be the non-modifiable /usr/bin/bash disk file, so it gets a 40 kb swap reservation.

Note that all of the heap, anon, and stack mappings are backed by swap space in their entirety.

Bottom line:

On Solaris, if you don't want to use up all your swap space to the point where you can't start new processes, don't have your processes ask for memory they don't actually use.

Or make a bigger swap partition.