sar(1) USER COMMANDS sar(1)
NAME
sar - system activity reporter
SYNOPSIS
sar [-ubdycwaqvmpgrkDSA] [-o file] t [ n ]
sar [-ubdycwaqvmpgrkDSA] [-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 pro-
cess waiting for block I/O, and otherwise idle. When
used with -D, %sys is split into percent of time ser-
vicing requests from remote machines (%sys remote) and
all other system time (%sys local). If you are using a
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, 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
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sar(1) USER COMMANDS sar(1)
reported for locally-mounted remote resources.
-d Report activity for each block device, e. g., disk or
tape drive. When data is displayed, the device specif-
ication 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:
%busy, avque - portion of time device was busy servic-
ing a transfer request, average number of requests out-
standing 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:
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sar(1) USER COMMANDS sar(1)
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.
NOTE Because memory is allocated dynamically, there is
no limit in the kernel on the number of file
structures. Therefore, the file-sz reported is not
meaningful.
-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";
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 steal-
ing daemon.
%ufsipf - the percentage of UFS 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
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sar(1) USER COMMANDS sar(1)
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).
-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 descrip-
tors 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.
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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