14.3 RAM

Maintaining watch directly on the system memory (RAM) is not usually that helpful in identifying performance problems. A better indication that memory might be affecting performance can be gained by watching for paging of data from memory to the swap files. Most current operating systems have a virtual memory that is made up of the actual (real) system memory using RAM chips, and one or more swap files on the system disks. Processes that are currently running are operating in real memory. The operating system can take pages from any of the processes currently in real memory and swap them out to disk. This is known as paging. Paging leaves free space in real memory to allocate to other processes that need to bring in a page from disk.^[2]

^[2] The term swapping refers to moving entire processes between main memory and the swap file. Most modern operating systems no longer swap processes; instead, they swap pages from processes.

Obviously, if all the processes currently running can fit into real memory, there is no need for the system to swap out any pages. However, if there are too many processes to fit into real memory, paging allows the system to free up system memory to run more processes. Paging affects system performance in many ways. One obvious way is that if a process has had some pages moved to disk and the process becomes runnable, the operating system has to pull back the pages from the disk before that process can be run. This leads to delays in performance. In addition, both the CPU and the disk I/O subsystem spend time doing the paging, reducing available processing power and increasing the load on the disks. This cascading effect involving both the CPU and I/O can degrade the performance of the whole system in such a way that it may be difficult to even recognize that paging is the problem. The extreme version of too much paging is thrashing, in which the system is spending so much time moving pages around that it fails to perform any other significant work. (The next step is likely to be a system crash.)

As with runnable queues (see Section 14.2), a little paging of the system does not affect performance enough to cause concern. In fact, some paging can be considered good. It indicates that the system's memory resources are being fully used. But at the point where paging becomes a significant overhead, the system is overloaded.

Monitoring paging is relatively easy. On Unix, the utilities vmstat and iostat provide details as to the level of paging, disk activity, and memory levels. On Windows, the performance monitor has categories to show these details, as well as being able to monitor the system swap files.

If there is more paging than is optimal, the system's RAM is insufficient or processes are too big. To improve this situation, you need to reduce the memory being used by reducing the number of processes or the memory utilization of some processes. Alternatively, you can add RAM. Assuming that it is your application that is causing the paging (otherwise, either the system needs an upgrade, or someone else's processes may also have to be tuned), you need to reduce the memory resources you are using. Chapter 4 provides useful recommendations for improving application-memory usage.

When the problem is caused by a combination of your application and others, you can partially address the situation by using process priorities (see Section 14.2). The equivalent to priority levels for memory usage is an all-or-nothing option, where you can lock a process in memory. This option is not available on all systems and is more often applied to shared memory than to processes, but nevertheless it is useful to know. If this option is applied, the process is locked into real memory and is not paged out at all. You need to be aware that using this option reduces the amount of RAM available to all other processes, which can make overall system performance worse. Any deterioration in system performance is likely to occur at heavy system loads, so make sure you extrapolate the effect of reducing the system memory in this way.