Saturday, July 6, 2013

Tuning os level



Tuning The Server

Some useful UNIX commands can be used to monitor server CPU and memory usage. Some of the commands vary depending upon the flavor of UNIX OS, we use. We will discuss some of the useful Unix commands with their parameters and options associated with them.

8  top
The UNIX top command provides information on CPU and memory utilization. The statistics are refreshed every few seconds to provide near real-time data. Statistics for CPU, memory, and swap space for the top command are given below.

o   CPU States as Displayed by top

Column                             Description
User                                   Percentage of CPU utilized by user.
System                               Percentage of CPU utilized by the server.
Idle                                    Percentage of CPU idle time.

o   Memory as Displayed by top

Column                             Description

Av                                      Available memory.
Used                                  Used memory.
Free                                   Free memory.

o   Swap as Displayed by top

Column                             Description
Av                                      Available swap space.
Used                                  Used swap space.
Free                                   Free swap space.

When we execute top command, the CPU, memory, and swap statistics are displayed, followed by a list of active system processes.

8  sar
System Activity Reporter (sar) has many different parameters that can be used. CPU utilization can be shown with the -u switch, for example, and memory swapping can be shown with the -w switch.The sar command requires two arguments, the first being the time interval between samples, and the second being the number of samples to take. The relevant columns and descriptions of the data of sar are listed below by executing sar -u to capture CPU utilization.

o   Columns and Descriptions for the sar -u Command

Column                             Description
%user                                Percentage of system utilized by users.
%system                            Percentage of system utilized by the OS.
%iowait                             Percentage waiting on I/O.
%idle                                 Percentage of server that is idle.
Lets take an example, if we want to display CPU utilization with five samples in 10 second intervals.Then We will run sar –u as follows:
$ sar – u  10 5

The relevant columns and descriptions of the data displayed by executing sar -r to capture memory utilization.

o   Statistics Displayed by the sar -r Command

Column                             Description
kbmemfree                       Free memory in KB.
kbmemused                      Memory used in KB.
%memused                       Percentage of memory used.
kbswpfree                                     Free swap space in KB.
kbswpused             Used swap space in KB.
%swpused             Percentage of used swap space.
Lets take an example,if we want to display server data for six samples with 5-second intervals between each sample, we need to run sar – r as follows:
$ sar – r 5 6

8  vmstat
We have one more command that can be used to display UNIX performance statistics is vmstat. Common statistics displayed by vmstat arranged in categories are listed below.



o   Categories for the vmstat Command

Category                           Description
procs                                 Information about processes.
memory                            Information about virtual and real memory.
wwap                                 Information about page faults and paging activity.
io                                       Information about I/O.
system                               Information about system interrupts and switches.
cpu                                    Information about percentage of CPU time.

Lets take an example of vmstat, if we want to display five summaries at 3-second intervals, the first summary being the summary since boot up.Then we will run vmstat as shown below:
$ vmstat 3 5

Additional details for key vmstat columns in the different categories are listed below.
o   Key vmstat Statistics

Column                             Description
r                                         Run queue.
free                                   Amount of idle memory (KB).
si                                        Amount of memory swapped in from disk (KB/s).
so                                       Amount of memory swapped to disk (KB/s).
bi                                       Blocks sent to a device.
bo                                      Blocks received from a device.
us                                       User time.
sy                                       System time.
id                                       Idle time.

8  Using ps
The UNIX ps command is used to display active processes. This command can be sorted by any of the columns that are displayed by it.

Lets take an example, if we want to sort by the sixth column, the CPU column, then we need to run the ps command as follows.
Ps –ef | sort +6 | tail

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