sar(1) CLIX sar(1)
NAME
sar - Reports system activity
SYNOPSIS
sar [-ubdycwaqvmprDSAC] [-o file] t [n]
sar [-ubdycwaqvmprDSAC] [-s time] [-e time] [-i sec] [-f file]
FLAGS
-u Reports 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 Reports 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, (1ibread/lread) as a
percentage;
pread/s, pwrit/s - transfers with raw (physical) device mechanism.
When used with -D, buffer caching is reported for locally-mounted
remote resources.
-d Reports activity for each block device, for example, 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 Reports TTY device activity:
2/94 - Intergraph Corporation 1
sar(1) CLIX sar(1)
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 Reports 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 Reports 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 Reports use of file access system routines:
iget/s, namei/s, dirblk/s.
-q Reports 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 Reports 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 Reports message and semaphore activities:
msg/s, sema/s - primitives per second.
-p Reports paging activities:
vflt/s - address translation page faults (valid page not in memory);
pflt/s - page faults from protection errors (illegal access to page)
2 Intergraph Corporation - 2/94
sar(1) CLIX sar(1)
or ``copy-on-writes'';
pgfil/s - vflt/s satisfied by page-in from file system;
rclm/s - valid pages reclaimed for free list.
-r Reports unused memory pages and disk blocks:
freemem - average pages available to user processes;
freeswap - disk blocks available for process swapping.
-D Reports 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 Reports 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 Reports all data. Equivalent to -udqbwcayvmprSDC.
-C Reports 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.
DESCRIPTION
The sar command reports on system activities. Before using the sar
2/94 - Intergraph Corporation 3
sar(1) CLIX sar(1)
command the first time after it has been loaded onto a system, a sar
control script named perf must be initialized by the superuser with the
following command. After running this command once, the files needed by
sar to run will be automatically invoked each time the system boots:
# /etc/init.d/perf init
The sar command, in the first synopsis 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 flag 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 flag
or, by default, the standard system activity daily data file for the
current day dd. The starting and ending times of the report can be
bounded with the -s and -e time arguments of the form hh [:mm[:ss]]. The
-i flag selects records at sec second intervals. Otherwise, all intervals
found in the data file are reported.
In either case, subsets of data to be displayed are specified by flags:
EXAMPLES
1. To see today's CPU activity so far:
sar
2. To watch CPU activity evolve for 10 minutes and save data:
sar -o temp 60 10
3. 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.
CAUTIONS
Since the sadc command (part of the sar utility, described in sar(8))
depends on the operating system kernel, it may generate console error
messages and/or provide incorrect information if used with a kernel from a
different release. Also, errors may occur between the time a kernel is
4 Intergraph Corporation - 2/94
sar(1) CLIX sar(1)
downloaded and when it is activated through a reboot.
DIAGNOSTICS
The following error message may appear on the console if the sadc command
is used with a kernel from a different release, or if the kernel you
booted from is not /unix:
NOTICE: growreg (/usr/lib/sa/sadc 1 1 ...) -- Insufficient memory to
allocate <#> pages.
EXIT VALUES
The sar command will exit with a value greater than 0 if it encounters a
problem.
RELATED INFORMATION
Commands: sag(1), sar(8)
2/94 - Intergraph Corporation 5