If you have ever used an application in Solaris that uses shared memory and that application has a tendency to not cleanup those memory segments properly on shutdown (SAP comes to mind) then this little Perl script is what you have been waiting for.
All this script does is take certain field output from the ipcs command and then iterate through it to determine if the memory is still actively in use by a process or if it it can safely be purged. I recommended testing this out with the $memclean line commented out to gain a good understanding before you remove the comment and allow the cleanup (#$memclean = `ipcrm -m $shmem`;). This script was tested on Solaris 10.
#!/usr/bin/perl
@sms = `ipcs -pm|grep "^m"|awk {'print \$2":"\$7":"\$8'}`;
foreach $sms (@sms) {
chomp($sms);
($shmem,$cpid,$lpid) = split(/:/,$sms);
$cpids=` ps -ef|grep $cpid|grep -v grep >/dev/null 2>&1;echo \$?`;
$lpids=` ps -ef|grep $lpid|grep -v grep >/dev/null 2>&1;echo \$?`;
chomp($cpids,$lpids);
if (($cpids eq "1") && ($lpids eq "1")) {
$message = "Memory can be reclaimed";
#$memclean = `ipcrm -m $shmem`;
} else {
$message = "Memory active";
}
print "$shmem - $cpid - $lpid - $cpids - $lpids - $message\n";
}
The output from the script will look similar to the following:
# perl mem_clean.pl
587203562 - 10885 - 17891 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
922746991 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995435 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995432 - 9728 - 17891 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995398 - 17421 - 17891 - 1 - 0 - Memory active
150995396 - 13421 - 13891 - 1 - 1 - Memory can be reclaimed
150995387 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995382 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995380 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995379 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995377 - 9728 - 17891 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995374 - 9728 - 17891 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
150995371 - 9727 - 10886 - 1 - 0 - Memory active
117440821 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
117440819 - 9728 - 10885 - 0 - 0 - Memory active
#
