Vmstat
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vmstat shows you statistics about your current system activity, e.g. I/O operations, swapping and memory usage:
$ vmstat 5 procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 1 0 17116 3440 3932 70976 1 6 161 23 548 232 22 4 58 16 3 0 17584 1812 3724 69040 0 94 270 563 1071 523 66 10 9 15 1 0 17656 5204 3820 69716 0 14 162 160 1027 344 23 7 59 11 0 0 17656 6364 3848 69916 6 0 16 126 1010 238 17 3 76 3
cpu
The 'us' (user) column will be mostly from application level processing, while the 'sy' (system) column is kernel (inside device drivers, filesystem code, etc.).
io
The numbers are seen from the processor. So, for io, bi (block in) means blocks that e.g. come from the harddrive or from the network card. bo (block out) means blocks that are sent from the processor to the network card or to the hard disk. If you want to know your file system's block size, use
stat -f /mnt/sdb1
if your file system is mounted on /mnt/sdb1. If your file system is ext3, you do not need to mount it to find out its block size, just use
tune2fs -l /dev/sdb1
See also
- top - See the top CPU consuming processes
- vmstat man page
- iostat - the same command for I/O