Memory usage in Solaris - memory not freed?

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi,

I'm running a multi-process software system on a Solaris 8 machine. When I monitor the memory usage, I see that the free memory is dropping rapidly, but I can't detect a process that uses this memory.

I'm using "top" to get the free memory and the memory usage of processes.

Thanks.

2

That sounds like a memory leak. Is there one process that has constantly growing memory?

3

I have no more Solaris 8 box available but it might be UFS cache memory still reported as used. It is no more on Solaris 10.

What reports "vmstat 5 5" when the memory is low ?

4

These commands will give you RSS/swap size for each process in memory; the prstat command will give you just the top few processes sorted by memory.
ps -elfy
prstat -s rss