sar(1) (System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1)
NAME
sar - system activity reporter
SYNOPSIS
sar [-ubdycwaqvmpgrkxDSAC] [-o file] t [ n ]
sar [-ubdycwaqvmpgrkxDSAC] [-s time] [-e time] [-i sec] [-f file]
DESCRIPTION
sar in the first instance, samples cumulative activity counters in
the operating system at n intervals of t seconds, where t should be 5
or greater. If t is specified with more than one option, all headers
are printed together and the output may be difficult to read. (If
the sampling interval is less than 5, the activity of sar itself may
affect the sample.) If the -o option is specified, it saves the
samples in file in binary format. The default value of n is 1. In
the second instance, with no sampling interval specified, sar
extracts data from a previously recorded file, either the one
specified by the -f option or, by default, the standard system
activity daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd for the current day dd.
The starting and ending times of the report can be bounded via the -s
and -e time arguments of the form hh[:mm[:ss]]. The -i option
selects records at sec second intervals. Otherwise, all intervals
found in the data file are reported.
In either case, subsets of data to be printed are specified by
option:
-u Report CPU utilization (the default):
%usr, %sys, %wio, %idle - portion of time running in user mode,
running in system mode, idle with some process waiting for block
I/O, and otherwise idle. When used with -D, %sys is split into
percent of time servicing requests from remote machines (%sys
remote) and all other system time (%sys local).
-b Report buffer activity:
bread/s, bwrit/s - transfers per second of data between system
buffers and disk or other block devices;
lread/s, lwrit/s - accesses of system buffers;
%rcache, %wcache - cache hit ratios, i. e., (1-bread/lread) as a
percentage;
pread/s, pwrit/s - transfers via raw (physical) device
mechanism. When used with -D, buffer caching is reported for
locally-mounted remote resources.
-d Report activity for each block device, e. g., disk or tape
drive, with the exception of XDC disks and tape drives. When
data is displayed, the device specification dsk- is generally
used to represent a disk drive. The device specification used
to represent a tape drive is machine dependent. The activity
data reported is:
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sar(1) (System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1)
%busy, avque - portion of time device was busy servicing a
transfer request, average number of requests outstanding during
that time;
r+w/s, blks/s - number of data transfers from or to device,
number of bytes transferred in 512-byte units;
avwait, avserv - average time in ms. that transfer requests wait
idly on queue, and average time to be serviced (which for disks
includes seek, rotational latency and data transfer times).
-y Report TTY device activity:
rawch/s, canch/s, outch/s - input character rate, input
character rate processed by canon, output character rate;
rcvin/s, xmtin/s, mdmin/s - receive, transmit and modem
interrupt rates.
-c Report system calls:
scall/s - system calls of all types;
sread/s, swrit/s, fork/s, exec/s - specific system calls;
rchar/s, wchar/s - characters transferred by read and write
system calls. When used with -D, the system calls are split
into incoming, outgoing, and strictly local calls. No incoming
or outgoing fork and exec calls are reported.
-w Report system swapping and switching activity:
swpin/s, swpot/s, bswin/s, bswot/s - number of transfers and
number of 512-byte units transferred for swapins and swapouts
(including initial loading of some programs);
pswch/s - process switches.
-a Report use of file access system routines:
iget/s, namei/s, dirblk/s.
-q Report average queue length while occupied, and % of time
occupied:
runq-sz, %runocc - run queue of processes in memory and
runnable;
swpq-sz, %swpocc - these are no longer reported by sar.
-v Report status of process, i-node, file tables:
proc-sz, inod-sz, file-sz, lock-sz - entries/size for each
table, evaluated once at sampling point;
ov - overflows that occur between sampling points for each
table.
-m Report message and semaphore activities:
msg/s, sema/s - primitives per second.
-p Report paging activities:
atch/s - page faults per second that are satisfied by reclaiming
a page currently in memory (attaches per second);
pgin/s - page-in requests per second;
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sar(1) (System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1)
ppgin/s - pages paged-in per second;
pflt/s - page faults from protection errors per second (illegal
access to page) or "copy-on-writes";
vflt/s - address translation page faults per second (valid page
not in memory);
slock/s - faults per second caused by software lock requests
requiring physical I/O.
-g Report paging activities:
pgout/s - page-out requests per second;
ppgout/s - pages paged-out per second;
pgfree/s - pages per second placed on the free list by the page
stealing daemon;
pgscan/s - pages per second scanned by the page stealing daemon.
%s5ipf - the percentage of S5 inodes taken off the freelist by
iget which had reusable pages associated with it. These pages
are flushed and cannot be reclaimed by processes. Thus this is
the percentage of igets with page flushes.
-r Report unused memory pages and disk blocks:
freemem - average pages available to user processes;
freeswap - disk blocks available for page swapping.
-k Report kernel memory allocation (KMA) activities:
sml_mem, alloc, fail - information about the memory pool
reserving and allocating space for small requests: the amount
of memory in bytes KMA has for the small pool, the number of
bytes allocated to satisfy requests for small amounts of memory,
and the number of requests for small amounts of memory that were
not satisfied (failed);
lg_mem, alloc, fail - information for the large memory pool
(analogous to the information for the small memory pool);
ovsz_alloc, fail - the amount of memory allocated for oversize
requests and the number of oversize requests which could not be
satisfied (because oversized memory is allocated dynamically,
there is not a pool).
-x Report remote file sharing (RFS) operations:
open/s, create/s, lookup/s, readdir/s, getpage/s, putpage/s,
other/s - The number of open, create, lookup, readdir, getpage,
putpage, and other operations made per second by clients
(incoming) and by the server (outgoing).
-D Report Remote File Sharing activity:
When used in combination with -u, -b or -c, it causes sar to
produce the remote file sharing version of the corresponding
report. -Du is assumed when only -D is specified.
-S Report server and request queue status:
serv/lo-hi - average number of Remote File Sharing servers on
the system (lo and hi are the minimum and maximum number of
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servers respectively.)
request %busy - % of time receive descriptors are on the request
queue
request avg lgth - average number of receive descriptors waiting
for service when queue is occupied
server %avail - % of time there are idle servers
server avg avail - average number of idle servers when idle ones
exist
-A Report all data. Equivalent to -udqbwcayvmpgrkxSDC.
-C Report Remote File Sharing data caching overhead:
snd-inv/s - number of invalidation messages per second sent by
your machine as a server.
snd-msg/s - total outgoing RFS messages sent per second.
rcv-inv/s - number of invalidation messages received from the
remote server.
rcv-msg/s - total number of incoming RFS messages received per
second.
dis-bread/s - number of read messages that would be eligible for
caching if caching had not been turned off because of an
invalidation message. (Indicates the penalty incurred because
of the invalidation message.)
blk-inv/s - number of pages removed from the client cache in
response to cache invalidation messages.
EXAMPLES
To see today's CPU activity so far:
sar
To watch CPU activity evolve for 10 minutes and save data:
sar -o temp 60 10
To later review disk and tape activity from that period:
sar -d -f temp
FILES
/var/adm/sa/sadd daily data file, where dd are digits representing
the day of the month.
SEE ALSO
sag(1G), sar(1M).
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