If you’re looking for CPU usage statistics and system performance on IBM AIX, sar might just be the tool your looking for. It’ll display information for 5 minutes intervals from midnight to current time. The output looks like this :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | login@servername:/> sar AIX servername 3 5 00CFE81B4C00 01/25/10 Configuration du système : lcpu=20 ent=8,00 00:00:01 %usr %sys %wio %idle physc %entc 00:05:01 2 2 0 96 0,40 5,0 00:10:01 3 2 0 94 0,48 6,0 00:15:00 1 1 0 98 0,21 2,6 00:20:01 1 1 0 98 0,23 2,9 00:25:01 2 1 1 97 0,25 3,2 00:30:01 1 1 0 98 0,23 2,9 00:35:00 2 1 1 96 0,31 3,8 00:40:01 1 1 0 98 0,21 2,6 00:45:01 1 1 0 98 0,22 2,7 00:50:00 1 1 0 98 0,23 2,8 00:55:00 1 1 0 98 0,21 2,6 01:00:00 1 1 0 98 0,21 2,6 01:05:00 2 1 0 96 0,35 4,4 |
The columns are the usual for this type of tools :
- %usr : the percent of time spent in user land. The higher the more CPU intensive processes you are running.
- %sys : the percent of time spent in kernel. This is mostly due to I/O intensive processes and/or processes performing a lot of syscalls.
- %wio : I’ve got no idea about that one … If you’ve got an explanation for this, feel free to hit the comments. I suspect this is the time spent waiting for I/Os to complete, or waiting after a busy device. This could be a sign of I/O (disk, network) bottlenecks
- %idle : the percent of time spent doing … nothing. The higher this number, the more underused your machine
- physc : no idea neither !
- %entc : the number of CPU used to absorb the load
If you’re looking for a top like tool, topas is the standard AIX equivalent.
