This Thursday (February 19th, 14:00 UTC), MC Brown & Trond Norbye will give a MySQL University session on Developing MySQL on Solaris. MC works on the MySQL Documentation Team and has been involved with quite a few Solaris things, for example porting MySQL to openSolaris. Trond has been involved with many things, including openSolaris, as you can see from his blog.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It …

The VM for Linux prefers system cache over application memory. What does this mean? The best way I can explain is by example.

Imagine you have 32 GB of RAM
MySQL is set to take 20 GB of RAM for a process based buffer and up to 6M for the various thread buffers.

Over a period of time the box swaps. The only thing that is running is mysql and its memory size is around 21GB for resident memory. Why does swap grow when there is plenty of memory? The reason is when a memory alloc is needed (thread based buffer is tickled) the VM will choose to use swap over allocating from the system cache, when there is not enough free memory.

DO NOT TURN OFF SWAP to prevent this. Your box will crawl, kswapd will chew up a lot of the processor, Linux needs swap enabled, lets just hope its not used.

So how do you stop Nagios pages because of swap usage? Well if you have a few choices.

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