sar(1M) UNIX System V(System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1M)
NAME
sar - system activity reporter
SYNOPSIS
sar [ -ubdycwaqvmpgrkxDSAC ] [ -o file ] t [ n ]
sar [ -ubdycwaqvmpgrkxDSAC ] [ -s time ] [ -e time ] [ -i sec ] [ -f file
]
DESCRIPTION
In the first instance, sar 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). If you are using an
AT&T 3B2 Computer with a co-processor, the CPU utilization (default)
report will contain the following fields:
%usr, %sys, %idle, scall/s - where scalls/s is the number of system
calls, of all types, encountered on the co-processor per second.
-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, that is, (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, for example, 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
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sar(1M) UNIX System V(System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1M)
a tape drive is machine dependent. The activity data reported is:
%busy, avque - portion of time device was busy servicing a transfer
request, ratio of total time for all requests to complete to total
time device was busy servicing these requests.
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 milliseconds 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 or
exec calls are reported.
-w Report system swapping and switching activity:
swpin/s, swpot/s, pswin/s, pswot/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;
ppgin/s - pages paged-in per second;
pflt/s - page faults from protection errors per second (illegal
access to page) or ``copy-on-writes''
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sar(1M) UNIX System V(System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1M)
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 them. 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:
smlmem, 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);
lgmem, alloc, fail - information for the large memory pool
(analogous to the information for the small memory pool);
ovszalloc, 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 servers
respectively.)
request %busy - % of time receive descriptors are on the request
queue
request avg lgth - average number of receive descriptors waiting for
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sar(1M) UNIX System V(System Performance Analysis Utilities) sar(1M)
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 ten 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(1M), sadc(1M)
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