SUMMARY: vmstat and system utilization on 5.1A PK3

From: Eiler, James A. <James.Eiler_at_alcoa.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 17:36:29 -0500

original message below.

Everybody told me the same thing....

Bottom line: read and COMPREHEND the man page for vmstat!

Per Brian Staab:

"The first line of vmstat shows statistics since boot time. All
subsequent lines show current real-time stats. It's very misleading to
use the single line of output."

I was confused by the CPU idle (id) going to zero after the first
line of "vmstat 1". Turns out I DO have something going on that's
utilizing all of my CPU.

Thanks to:

Dr Thomas.Blinn
Steve Feehan
Dan Price
Brian Staab

-----Original Message-----
From: Eiler, James A. [mailto:James.Eiler_at_alcoa.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 3:45 PM
To: 'Tru64-unix-managers_at_ornl.gov'
Cc: Emerson, Ken R.
Subject: vmstat and system utilization on 5.1A PK3


All,

We've added PK3 and have noticed that the system utilization numbers from
"vmstat 1" don't seem to make sense any more.

If I do a series of vmstat commands, the utilization looks as follows:

ager99>vmstat
Virtual Memory Statistics: (pagesize = 8192)
  procs memory pages intr cpu
  r w u act free wire fault cow zero react pin pout in sy cs us
sy id
  7 621 27 46K 5529 10K 37M 5M 12M 367 7M 0 459 381K 1K 9
34 57
ager99>vmstat
Virtual Memory Statistics: (pagesize = 8192)
  procs memory pages intr cpu
  r w u act free wire fault cow zero react pin pout in sy cs us
sy id
  9 619 27 46K 5529 10K 37M 5M 12M 367 7M 0 459 381K 1K 9
34 57
ager99>vmstat
Virtual Memory Statistics: (pagesize = 8192)
  procs memory pages intr cpu
  r w u act free wire fault cow zero react pin pout in sy cs us
sy id
  7 621 27 46K 5529 10K 37M 5M 12M 367 7M 0 459 381K 1K 9
34 57

But if I use the 1 second option, the first line printed looks like the
others, then the succeeding lines look strange (including "fault cow zero
react pin"):

ager99>vmstat 1
Virtual Memory Statistics: (pagesize = 8192)
  procs memory pages intr cpu
  r w u act free wire fault cow zero react pin pout in sy cs us
sy id
  8 620 27 46K 5529 10K 37M 5M 12M 367 7M 0 459 381K 1K 9
34 57
  5 623 27 46K 5527 10K 2 16 19 0 28 0 1K 882K 2K 22
78 0
  5 623 27 46K 5528 10K 0 0 0 0 0 0 998 892K 2K 22
78 0
  9 619 27 46K 5528 10K 0 0 0 0 0 0 978 897K 2K 22
78 0
  7 621 27 46K 5528 10K 0 0 0 0 0 0 1K 880K 2K 23
77 0
  8 620 27 46K 5528 10K 0 0 0 0 0 0 1K 885K 2K 21
79 0
  8 620 27 46K 5528 10K 0 0 0 0 0 0 1K 883K 2K 23
77 0

Did something get broken in PK3?

Thanks!

Jim
Received on Tue Oct 29 2002 - 22:37:16 NZDT

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