Understanding vmstat output!

[Ugly Kid Joe]

Hi people,
Please can someone explain me how to interpret the output of vmstat?!?
Im asked to do a graphic report on % of CPU usage, physical memory usage as well as swap out of vmstat output. CPU usage is simple since i just have to take the rows of 'us' column, but for the physical memory and swap im quite confused, here's a sample output:

procs memory page faults cpu
r b w avm free re at pi po fr de sr in sy cs us sy id
1 1 0 26889 120944 263 28 4 1 46 0 2 711 43510 982 26 9 65
1 1 0 25629 121292 327 41 10 0 56 0 0 547 12670 349 1 4 95
0 1 0 25594 120033 409 61 3 1 65 0 0 540 10636 691 10 5 85
3 1 0 22516 118281 203 36 1 0 35 0 0 478 17873 444 64 15 21
0 1 0 16041 121114 369 43 6 0 44 0 0 540 10142 314 9 7 84
0 1 0 20946 121098 293 31 3 0 32 0 0 531 31901 667 23 13 64

What unit AVM and the free columns are using ??? How can i use those values to get % of physical memory available and swap ??

If i do swapinfo -tam i get these:
Mb Mb Mb PCT START/ Mb
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED LIMIT RESERVE PRI NAME
dev 4096 195 3901 5% 0 - 1 /dev/vg00/lvol2
reserve - 668 -668
memory 3111 2522 589 81%
total 7207 3385 3822 47% - 0 -
Which is pretty self-explanatory!!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank You.

[RAC_1]

Why to get it from vmstat, when you can get all these values from MWA. Do you have MWA installed? then you can just do extract -xp -v and get it. Also the required details for vmstat are in vmstat man page.

[Ugly Kid Joe]

Well thanks for the info, but i need to stick to vmstat as im also working on others unix platforms(solaris and AiX)

[RAC_1 · Accepted solution]

Free column value is in pages and page value (on hp-ux is 4096 kb/each page).

so gettiing free column and multipleying it by 4096 will give value in KB. Then substract it from virtual mem (RAM + swap), that would give you % memory usage.

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi,

Check this out : ftp://eh:spear9@hprc.external.hp.com/memory.htm


-Arun