Solaris: what’s a kernel trap

kernelsolaristop

I'm trying to understand whether the high trap count reported by top on Solaris 10

Kernel: 1659 ctxsw, 1069 trap, 4433 intr, 3837 syscall, 5 fork
Memory: 8192M phys mem, 299M free mem, 4103M total swap, 3236M free swap

is a problem or not.

Googling for kernel traps mainly returns large documents on kernel architecture; cliff notes would be much appreciated.

Thanks

PS. Never mind the swapping

Best Answer

It is a sort of interrupt probably coming from the cpu but that is not important right now. See man trapstat and read the links you have gathered at your leisure.

You are wrong to say never mind the swapping because (especially since your server has not crashed) the traps are probably memory related and due to TLB misses. Use trapstat -T to see if you might benefit from large pages (and maybe buy some more RAM).

Whether it is a problem, who can say?

As an aside, prstat is normally used instead of top.

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