Howto troubleshoot Perfomance using vmstat & iostat

UNIX Solaris
1

Can anyone tell me what to look for in terms of abnormal numbers on vmstat or iostat?
I have a box with figures pbelow, how would I tell if it's underperforming & what remedies \ perfomance tuning could I perform?

thanks all

-------------------------------------

-vmstat 5 5
kthr memory page disk faults cpu
r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr s6 sd sd sd in sy cs us sy id
0 0 0 20258552 6355368 326 278 1998 10 11 0 9 0 23 0 0 984 1552 655 6 2 92
0 0 0 20267192 5904752 388 643 3455 0 0 0 0 0 63 0 0 2610 3075 1365 22 3 75
0 0 0 20269656 5906752 449 50 5142 14 13 0 0 0 89 0 0 2792 2767 1418 11 2 87
0 0 0 20266528 5903616 77 642 38 0 0 0 0 0 12 0 0 1502 6421 1097 26 3 71
0 0 0 20268256 5905280 4 991 18 0 0 0 0 0 10 0 0 1086 2827 797 15 2 83

-iostat 5 5
tty sd6 ssd3 ssd5 ssd7 cpu
tin tout kps tps serv kps tps serv kps tps serv kps tps serv us sy wt id
0 1 0 0 0 547 23 14 7 0 6 7 0 5 6 2 7 84
0 47 0 0 0 628 15 16 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 3 94
0 16 0 0 0 2263 84 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 17 4 4 75

0 16 0 0 0 1941 89 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 7 3 4 86
0 16 0 0 0 2446 142 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 17 4 10 69

2

Install ORCA OrcaWare Technologies - Home Page
Its a good tool.

3

@incredible,tx, shall do -

Back to the question at hand
can anyone tell me about the perfomance of a box from the above stats ?

thanks

4

Looks OK. Can you also provide the prstat -a output?

5

The "9" figure in the sr column shows that your system has got low of memory at some point (the first line being a summary of the system since it booted up, but I have seen systems with much larger figures than that.
The "1998" for paging in also indicates your system has run out of memory at some time and had to page in from swap space.
This could be caused by for instance a backup running overnight in which case it is not a problem.

The figures here look like the output from mpstat (?), if that is the case then wt column shows your system is experiencing some Input / Output waits which I would expect to be zero for most of the time so you may need to stripe a busy disk volume or install more memory but again if this of not affecting performance when it matters.

An iostat would show which disk volume is busy.

None of the figures are outrageous.

Enabling the sys user crontab entries for sar can be very useful for gathering historical performance data, so that if a user reports that they experienced bad performance yesterday afternoon you can go back and take a look at the figures.