swap displays differently

A new x86 server was installed with 16G of memory. The swap space assigned in the prtvtoc is also 16G. But after the installation of the OS and verifying, noticed df -k output for swap shows as 30G. Other systems do not have this characteristic. Whats wrong in here?:eek:

Hello,

Can you post "swap -s" output?

Nothing wrong. swap can mean different things depending on the context.

30 GB is the size of the virtual memory available which includes both real memory (RAM) and disk space (swap area).

hi vimes, i don have the access to system at the moment will see to get the output.
jlliagre, I did explain the same to my client but he was not satisfied with my answer.. I also checked across the other systems and did compare...
if the prtvtoc is configured with 16G, the df -k output for swap is also around 16G, which mounts on /tmp, /var/run , /etc/svc/volatile..

But on this system, swap for /tmp, /var/run , /etc/svc/volatile shows around 30G.. That's why feeling wierd..:confused:

There is no "df -k" report for the swap space as the swap space isn't mounted and isn't a filesystem anyway.

What you see are filesystems using the virtual memory as back-end, kind of RAM-Disks. These filesystems size reports are documented to be of limited accuracy. They might also have been mounted with the "size=xxx" option to limit tmpfs resource usage.

If you want to retrieve information about the virtual memory usage and the swap area size, "swap -s" and "swap -l" are the right commands.