HPUX performance

[Nazri]

Dear Experts,

According to my HPUX Peformance Tuning instructor, command "uptime" is a good tool to asses the loading of a system, thus giving a general idea if the system is overloaded or otherwise. A general guideline for this command is

load <= 1 - not heavy
1 <= load <= 4 - quite heavy
and anything above 7 is "high".

Can we use other tool to compliment "uptime" ? I have seen somewhere that we can use "sar -q" and check out the number reported under "runq-sz" - Average length of the run queue(s) of processes(in memory and runnable). What's the general guidelines using "sar -q" to determine system load ?

Thanks in advance.

[Michael Tully]

This is not the only indicator of how busy a system is. You can also utilise 'top' and 'glance' if it is loaded.

In regards to the load,

< 1 = system is not busy
> 1 < 2 system is relatively busy and coping
> 3 system is struggling
More than this you have problems, run away processes, processes waiting on CPU etc. 'glance' is a very valuable tool that will report not only load, but CPU, memory, swap etc.

Yes you can use sar -q or uptime, but top is much better.

[Nazri]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the prompt reply. I am beginning to like this forum already :)

I do not have 'Glance' installed on the system. Hence, I have to rely on the generic tools like top, uptime, sar and etc.

To your knowledge, is there a way to find out the number of processes "waiting" for system resources ?

Regards.

[Michael Tully]

You can actually load a trial version of glance from your application CD set. It has a 60 day license.

You can use the 'ps' command to get the information. The part your looking for is 'wchan'

wchan - The event for which the process is waiting or sleeping; if there is none, a hyphen (-) is displayed.

have a look at the man page for further info.

[Michael Tully]

Here are a couple of examples.

UNIX95 =ps -eo ruser,pid,args,wchan|sort -rn
UNIX95= ps -eo time,ruser,pid,args,wchan | sort -rn -k 1,1

ps -ae | sort -rn -k 3,3

Another tool that could be useful for determining why is called 'lsof' It is free and you can get it from here:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/lsof-4.61/

[Michael Tully]

Here are a couple of examples.

UNIX95 =ps -eo ruser,pid,args,wchan|sort -rn
UNIX95= ps -eo time,ruser,pid,args,wchan | sort -rn -k 1,1

ps -ae | sort -rn -k 3,3

Another tool that could be useful for determining why is called 'lsof' It is free and you can get it from here:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/lsof-4.61/