How to load .profile without relogin in AIX

Your .profile should be loaded when you log in, not in each terminal. Its purpose is to define environment variables and other settings for the whole session (including your window manager and any program you start from it such as Emacs). It's normal that ~/.profile isn't read when you start a terminal: it's rare to need to define environment variables then. Your shell has an initialization file (.bashrc or .zshrc or similar file), usually used to define functions and aliases and set shell options.

On .profile, its cousins and how they are loaded, read this answer and the ones I link to. All systems have a way to set environments variables when you log in, but there is some variation as to how (a lot of environments read .profile, but some such as yours don't).

Short version: look at the in use clnt+pers pages in the svmon -G output (unit is 4k pages) if you want to know all file cache, or look at vmstat -v and look at "file pages" for file cache excluding executables (same unit).

You should check out the following article if you want a good overview of what's going on: Overview of AIX page replacement.

For an extremely short summary, memory in AIX is classified in two ways:

• Working memory vs permanent memory

  • Working memory is process (stack, heap, shared memory) and kernel memory. If that sort of memory needs to be pages out, it goes to swap.

  • Permanent memory is file cache. If that needs to be paged out, it goes back out to the filesystem where it came from (for dirty pages, clean pages just get recycled). This is subdivided into non-client (or persistent) pages for JFS filesystems, and client pages for JFS2, NFS, and possibly others.

• Computational vs non-computational pages.

  • Computational pages are again process and kernel data, plus process text data (i.e. pages that cache the executable/code).

  • Non-computational are the other ones: file cache that's not executable (or shared library).

svmon -G (btw, svmon -G -O unit=MB is a bit friendlier) gives you the work versus permanent pages. The work column is, well, work memory. You get the permanent memory by adding up the pers (JFS) and clnt (JFS2) columns.

In your case, you've got about 730MB of permanent pages, that are backed by your filesystems (186151*4k pages).

Now the topas top-right "widget" FileSystemCache (numperm) shows something slightly different, and you'd get that same data with vmstat -v: that's only non-computational permanent pages. i.e. same thing as above, but excluding pages for executables.

In your case, that's about 350MB (2.2% of 16G).

Either way, that's really not much cache.