NAME

sar − system activity reporter

SYNOPSIS

sar [−ubdycwaqvmprDSAC] [−o file] t [ n ]

sar [−ubdycwaqvmprDSAC] [−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 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 /usr/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.  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:
%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. 

−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 − swap queue of processes swapped out but ready to run.

−v Report status of process, inode, file tables:
text-sz, 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:
vflt/s − address translation page faults (valid page not in memory);
pflt/s − page faults from protection errors (illegal access to page) or "copy-on-writes";
pgfil/s − vflt/s satisfied by page-in from file system;
rclm/s − valid pages reclaimed for free list.

−r Report unused memory pages and disk blocks:
freemem − average pages available to user processes;
freeswap − disk blocks available for process swapping.

−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:
Average number of Remote File Sharing servers on the system (serv/lo-hi), % of time receive descriptors are on the request queue (request %busy), average number of receive descriptors waiting for service when queue is occupied (request avg lgth), % of time there are idle servers (server %avail), average number of idle servers when idle ones exist (server avg avail).

−A Report all data.  Equivalent to −udqbwcayvmprSDC. 

−C Report Remote File Sharing buffer 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 buffer reads that would be eligible for caching if caching were not turned off. (Indicates the penalty of running uncached.)
blk-inv/s - number of buffers removed from the client cache.

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

/usr/adm/sa/sadd daily data file, where dd are digits representing the day of the month

SEE ALSO

sag(1G), sar(1M). 

\*U  —  Version 1.0