http://procps.sourceforge.net and is licensed under the GPL. While you can download and install the latest version of procps, it’s a standard set of utilities found in almost every Linux install.
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Last month’s “Tech Support” showed how to monitor resource utilization with Cacti. This month, let’s use vmstat to track down any bottlenecks that Cacti might have found. Part of the procps package (which contains many other useful utilities such as ps, top, w, and kill), vmstat reports statistical information about process status, memory consumption, paging activity, block I/O operations, interrupts, context switches, and processor usage. vmstat is available from http://procps.sourceforge.net and is licensed under the GPL. While you can download and install the latest version of procps, it’s a standard set of utilities found in almost every Linux install.
Last month’s “Tech Support” showed how to monitor resource utilization with Cacti. This month, let’s use vmstat to track down any bottlenecks that Cacti might have found. Part of the procps package (which contains many other useful utilities such as ps, top, w, and kill), vmstat reports statistical information about process status, memory consumption, paging activity, block I/O operations, interrupts, context switches, and processor usage. vmstat is available from http://procps.sourceforge.net and is licensed under the GPL. While you can download and install the latest version of procps, it’s a standard set of utilities found in almost every Linux install.
A nice feature of vmstat is its overview of process, memory, swap, I/O, system, and CPU activity in just one line of numbers. Figure One shows a sample of vmstat output.
Figure One: Sample output of vmstat
procs memory swap io system cpu r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 104232 218884 3364308 0 0 0 1 1 1 4 1 0 1
Briefly, r and b are the number of processes waiting for run time and the number of processes in uninterruptible sleep, respectively. swpd, free, buff, and cache display how much virtual memory is being used (kB), the amount of idle memory (kB), the amount of memory used as buffers (kB),…
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