filesystem admin

[lawrenzo_1]

Hello,

I am carrying out house keeping in /var on a server, there are files called /var/adm/sa/sa(dayofmonth).Z

there are 11 days of files compressed and they are awk program text - so

1. waht are these files for?
2. how many days do I really need to keep
3. can they be removed/

Thanks for your help

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Lawrenzo,

1. Look at your 'crontab -l' output. You should see few entries with 'sa1' 'sa2' etc., They collect and process 'sar' data that is used for performance monitoring. The data is stored in these files.

2. It depends on how long you want to keep your performance data.

3. Again it depends. If you want to see the CPU utilization 10 days back, use 'sar -s -e ' and it will pull it from the 10 days old sa* files.

Normally sysadmins configure 'sa2' script also in cronjob that cleansup old files.

-Sri

[A. Clay Stephenson]

These are data files gathered the sadc (SAR data collector). Because you don't know until you need them, it's hard to know how far back you want to look for possible performance problems. These things don't take up much space as long as you keep sample times reasonable (~ every 20 minutes) and again, you don't know when you will need them until you need them. You can blow them away but you will be limited to only "here and now" sar outputs.

If you are running more advanced performance metrics (e.g. MeasureWare) then you really don't need these at all and you should turn sar off.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

These are the output of sar jobs that are probably scheduled through cron. We normally keep 10 days worth of these files around on the servers we generate these files.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[lawrenzo_1]

Thanks all - we do run more advanced measureware.