Re: vmstat meaning

From: Sonny Boy (fmma_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 03/06/04

  • Next message: Vigilance Monitoring: "Re: vmstat meaning" 
    Date: 6 Mar 2004 09:13:23 -0800

    Yes, more RAM please. Also, what kind'a h/w is this, pretty busy
    judging by the page in, scan rate, & context switching column.

    Juha Laiho <Juha.Laiho@iki.fi> wrote in message news:<c2akt3$421$2@ichaos.ichaos-int>...
    > sankarmukh@yahoo.com (Sankar) said:
    > >One of our unix box running in solaris 2.6 always shows 0% idle.
    > >
    > >vmstat shows:
    > >sol1001> vmstat 3 3
    > > procs memory page disk faults
    > >cpu
    > > r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr s0 s1 s6 s3 in sy cs
    > >us sy id
    > > 0 0 13 824 632 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 3 4294967196 0 0
    > >-30 -8 -82
    > > 0 1 25 626960 16000 9 2 5720 90 776 0 150 1 0 0 48 1524 2391 2259
    > >20 16 65
    > > 0 0 25 626960 15744 9 0 5085 85 968 0 163 0 0 0 27 1309 2198 1987
    > >18 16 66
    > >sol1001>
    > >
    > >sar shows:
    > >
    > >inafpuxpdt01> sar -u 3 3
    > >
    > >SunOS sol1001 5.6 Generic_105181-29 sun4u 03/04/04
    > >
    > >14:35:51 %usr %sys %wio %idle
    > >14:35:54 4 18 78 0
    > >14:35:57 13 16 72 0
    > >14:36:00 6 15 79 0
    > >
    > >Average 8 16 76 0
    > >
    > >What does the first line in vmstat mean? why such a high number under
    > >faults? why negative numbers uber user,system and idle?
    >
    > The first line is some kind of summary from system boot; the negative
    > numbers could be a result of some kind of counter overflow or perhaps
    > some overflow during the computation. More or less nothing to worry.
    >
    > Where I would worry is that very high %wio you see with sar -- the
    > system is spending most of its wall-clock time waiting for I/O
    > completion of some kind. It could be either genuine filesystem I/O
    > or paging activity, but whatever it is it is bogging down your system.
    >
    > iostat would be a good command to find out the details on this, though
    > you may need to play with the options a bit to find out which of
    > your filesystems and devices are the most loaded ones.
    >
    > If it's paging activity that is causing that high %wio, then you'll
    > either need to get more physical memory to the machine or to reduce
    > the memory consumption somehow. "ps -fly" should be a good command
    > to find out about processes consuming large amounts of memory.

  • Next message: Vigilance Monitoring: "Re: vmstat meaning"