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Full Discussion: top - Load average
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers top - Load average Post 302239744 by avronius on Wednesday 24th of September 2008 10:57:33 AM
Old 09-24-2008
top, by itself, won't show you the complete picture of system performance.
There are a handful of tools that you can look into that will help you get a better understanding of what is causing performance bottle necks on your system.

Here are some tools that are useful for analyzing system performance (your UNIX may not have all of them - you may need to compile some from source code, or they may simply not be available):
sar
prstat
iostat
mpstat
vmstat
top
swap -s
and many others (perhaps others can chime in with their favourites...)

Spend a couple of hours reading the man pages for these utilities. Maybe write a cron job that will capture these statistics every hour - or ever 5 minutes during peak times... You'll get a better picture of performance.

Once you have more data, if you still have questions, start a new post in the OS specific thread for your system.

Good luck!
 

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sar(1M) 						  System Administration Commands						   sar(1M)

NAME
sar, sa1, sa2, sadc - system activity report package SYNOPSIS
/usr/lib/sa/sadc [ t n] [ofile] /usr/lib/sa/sa1 [ t n] /usr/lib/sa/sa2 [-aAbcdgkmpqruvwy] [-e time] [-f filename] [-i sec] [-s time] DESCRIPTION
System activity data can be accessed at the special request of a user (see sar(1)) and automatically, on a routine basis, as described here. The operating system contains several counters that are incremented as various system actions occur. These include counters for CPU utilization, buffer usage, disk and tape I/O activity, TTY device activity, switching and system-call activity, file-access, queue activ- ity, inter-process communications, and paging. For more general system statistics, use iostat(1M), sar(1), or vmstat(1M). sadc and two shell procedures, sa1 and sa2, are used to sample, save, and process this data. sadc, the data collector, samples system data n times, with an interval of t seconds between samples, and writes in binary format to ofile or to standard output. The sampling interval t should be greater than 5 seconds; otherwise, the activity of sadc itself may affect the sam- ple. If t and n are omitted, a special record is written. This facility can be used at system boot time, when booting to a multi-user state, to mark the time at which the counters restart from zero. For example, when accounting is enabled, the svc:/sys- tem/sar:default service writes the restart mark to the daily data file using the command entry: su sys -c "/usr/lib/sa/sadc /var/adm/sa/sa'date +%d'" The shell script sa1, a variant of sadc, is used to collect and store data in the binary file /var/adm/sa/sadd, where dd is the current day. The arguments t and n cause records to be written n times at an interval of t seconds, or once if omitted. The following entries in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/sys will produce records every 20 minutes during working hours and hourly otherwise: 0 * * * 0-6 /usr/lib/sa/sa1 20,40 8-17 * * 1-5 /usr/lib/sa/sa1 See crontab(1) for details. The shell script sa2, a variant of sar, writes a daily report in the file /var/adm/sa/sardd. See the OPTIONS section in sar(1) for an explanation of the various options. The following entry in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/sys will report important activities hourly during the working day: 5 18 * * 1-5 /usr/lib/sa/sa2 -s 8:00 -e 18:01 -i 1200 -A FILES
/tmp/sa.adrfl address file /var/adm/sa/sadd Daily data file /var/adm/sa/sardd Daily report file /var/spool/cron/crontabs/sys ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWaccu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
crontab(1), sag(1), sar(1), svcs(1), timex(1), iostat(1M), svcadm(1M), vmstat(1M), attributes(5), smf(5) System Administration Guide: Basic Administration NOTES
The sar service is managed by the service management facility, smf(5), under the service identifier: svc:/system/sar Administrative actions on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or requesting restart, can be performed using svcadm(1M). The ser- vice's status can be queried using the svcs(1) command. SunOS 5.10 20 Aug 2004 sar(1M)
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