esxtop

We had a discussion internally about performance and swapping. I started writing this article and asked Frank if it made sense. Frank’s reply “just guess what I am writing about at the moment”. As both of us had a different approach we decided to launch both articles at the same time and refer to each others post. So here’s the link to Frank’s take on the discussion and I highly recommend reading it: “Re: Swapping“.

As always the common theme of the discussion was “swapping bad”. Although I don’t necessarily disagree. I do want to note that it is important to figure out if the system is actually actively swapping or not.

In many cases “bad performance” is blamed on swapping. However this is not always the case. As described in my section on “ESXTOP”  there are multiple metrics on “swap” itself. Only a few of those relate to performance degradation due to swapping. I’ve listed the important metrics below.

Host:
MEM – SWAP/MB curr = Total swapped machine memory of all the groups including virtual machines.
MEM – SWAP/MB “target” = The expected swap usage.
MEM – SWAP/MB “r/s” = The rate at which memory is swapped in from disk.
MEM – SWAP/MB “w/s” = the rate at machine memory is swapped out to disk.

VM:
MEM – SWCUR = If larger than 0 host has swapped memory pages from this VM in the past.
MEM – SWTGT = The expected swap usage.
MEM – SWR/s (J) = If larger than 0 host is actively reading from swap(vswp).
MEM – SWW/s (J) = If larger than 0 host is actively writing to swap(vswp).

So which metrics do really matter when your customer complains about degradation of performance?

First metric to check:
SWR/s (J) = If larger than zero the ESX host is actively reading from swap(vswp).

Associated to that metric I would recommend looking at the following metric:
%SWPWT = The percentage of time the world is waiting for the ESX VMKernel swapping memory.

So what about all those other metrics? Why don’t they really matter?
Take “Current Swap”, as long as it is not being “read” it might just be one of those pages sporadically used which is just sitting there doing nothing. Will it hurt performance? Maybe, but currently as long as it is not being read… no it will most likely not hurt. Even writing to swap does not necessarily hurt performance, it might though. Those should just be used as indicators that the system is severely overcommitted and that performance might be degraded in the future when pages are being read!

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