anyone have good documentation on vmstat?

[n0cmonkey]

Every man page I have looked at has had poor documentation (OpenBSD even admits this). I would prefer information specifically on Solaris (7&8) if at all possible, but will take good information on any.

Basically, I need to figure out what vmstat -s shows me, in better detail than the categories it lists. snortcenter is looking for "pages active" and "per page," but the Solaris vmstat does not have these listings. I was hoping there is an equivilent, or something similar enough that I can modify the script and feel confident we are getting the information we want. I'll list what I do get, with the stats removed:

# vmstat -s| more
swap ins
swap outs
pages swapped in
pages swapped out
total address trans. faults taken
page ins
page outs
pages paged in
pages paged out
total reclaims
reclaims from free list
micro (hat) faults
minor (as) faults
major faults
copy-on-write faults
zero fill page faults
pages examined by the clock daemon
revolutions of the clock hand
pages freed by the clock daemon
forks
vforks
execs
cpu context switches
device interrupts
traps
system calls
total name lookups (cache hits 72%)
user cpu
system cpu
idle cpu
wait cpu

Again, I have looked for information, and will continue to look for information. But if anyone has any good information out there, please let me know. Back to google now. Thanks in advance

 

[n0cmonkey]

http://nscp.upenn.edu/aix4.3html/cmds/aixcmds6/vmstat.htm provides some good information! Good luck with your problem

Now off to translate "pages active" so I can try to figure out what this script is really trying to do

 

[n0cmonkey]

It's kind of duh, but here:

Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 12:16:30 -0500
From: Matthew Boehm
Subject: OSX Virtual Memory


Nobody seemed to mention a utility for Linux/FreeBSD/Darwin that is specifically designed to monitor virtual memory. As a Linux System Admin I do this alot because customers complain that their servers are "running slow".

Under linux/FreeBSD the command is "vmstat". Under Darwin, vm_stat. You can view the man page on it or by typing 'man vm_stat'

By providing an optional interval, vm_stat will activally show you what is happening with virtual memory. Pay special attention to 'Pages Free', and 'Pages Active' corresponding to ammount of free VM and ammount of VM that is active.

By monitoring the 'Pageins' and 'Pageouts' you can watch how much info is being transfered in and out of VM from RAM. The higher these numbers, the slower your system will be.

HTH!