Using rcapstat to Monitor the RSS of a Project

The following command produces reports at 5-second sampling intervals. A report will be issued five times, once after each sample.

user1machine% rcapstat 5 5

id     project   nproc    vm   rss   cap    at avgat    pg avgpg
376565 user1        57  209M   46M   10M  440M  220M 5528K 2764K
376565 user1        57  209M   44M   10M  394M  131M 4912K 1637K
376565 user1        56  207M   43M   10M  440M  147M 6048K 2016K
376565 user1        56  207M   42M   10M  522M  174M 4368K 1456K
376565 user1        56  207M   44M   10M  482M  161M 3376K 1125K

In this example, the project user1 has an RSS in excess of its physical memory cap. The nonzero values in the pg column indicate that rcapd is consistently paging out memory as it attempts to meet the cap by lowering the physical memory utilization of the project's processes. However, rcapd is unsuccessful, as indicated by the varying rss values that do not show a corresponding decrease. This means that the application's resident memory is being actively used, forcing rcapd to affect the working set. Under this condition, the system will continue to experience high page fault rates, and associated I/O, until the working set size is reduced, the cap is raised, or the application changes its memory access pattern.