Releasing the swap space Solaris

Hi Guys !

I have found this problem many times that the swap space (/tmp space more precisely )of my Server becomes full specially when i run a complete back up of the server .

once the /tmp space is full I am not able to run simple commands as i get error like :

fork no space

on checking df -hk , i could see that /tmp space which is also the swap space becomes full . on checking /tmp directory i could see there was nothing in that , thus i realized that this was due toh the long activity of backup done before and the server is not releasing this space .

In order to release this space i rebooted the system and the /tmp space was empty and probelm was fixed .

Can anybody suggest any other way of releasing the /tmp space ?

I am using Solaris 10 .

Stopping as many process as possible?

The other option is to add some swap space either by adding more raw disk space or else using the swapon(1m) command to make a swapfile in a volume with spare space although that is not as quick as real swapfs swap space.

Which is conceptually similar to rebooting the OS.

Unlike most if not all Unix/Unix like variants, swapon isn't the Solaris way. Use instead:

swap -a <file or device>

Anyway, I'm confused as I already replied to that very same question here but it seems these postings have vanished ...

Just found you posted again the very same question in a new thread, this is pointless and unconstructive. Please follow up in the original one:

swapon was a SunOS command, that was quite a while ago!

Double post. Continued here.