Determining Which Process Is Using A Lot Of Memory; Built-In Platform Memory Monitoring; Memory Thresholds - Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Troubleshooting Manual

Troubleshooting Memory

Determining Which Process Is Using a Lot of Memory

The following commands can help you identify if a specific process is using a lot of memory:
• The show process memory command displays the memory allocation per process.

Built-in Platform Memory Monitoring

Cisco NX-OS has built-in kernel monitoring of memory usage to help avoid system hangs, process crashes,
and other undesirable behavior. The platform manager periodically checks the memory utilization (relative
to the total RAM present) and automatically generates an alert event if the utilization passes the configured
threshold values. When an alert level is reached, the kernel attempts to free memory by releasing pages that
are no longer needed (for example, the page cache of persistent files that are no longer being accessed), or if
critical levels are reached, the kernel will kill the highest utilization process. Other Cisco NX-OS components
have introduced memory alert handling, such as the Border Gateway Protocol's (BGP's) graceful low memory
handling, that allows processes to adjust their behavior to keep memory utilization under control.

Memory Thresholds

When many features are deployed, baseline memory requires the following thresholds:
• 85% MINOR
• 90% SEVERE
• 95% CRITICAL
The thresholds are configurable using the system memory-thresholds minor percentage severe percentage
critical percentage command.
switch# show processes memory
PID MemAlloc MemLimit
----- -------- ---------- ---------- ----------------- ---------
4662 52756480 562929945
The output of the show process memory command might not provide a completely
Note
accurate picture of the current utilization (allocated does not mean in use). This command
is useful for determining if a process is approaching its limit.
Determining Which Process Is Using a Lot of Memory
MemUsed StackBase/Ptr
150167552 bfffdf00/bfffd970 netstack
Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Troubleshooting Guide, Release 7.x
Process
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