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Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory iostat output vs TPC output (array layer) Post 302517362 by DGPickett on Tuesday 26th of April 2011 02:59:55 PM
Old 04-26-2011
Well, it is a complex world, with security and speed in opposition. One oddity of expanding sidk sizes is that one new big disk may be overwhelmed with the level of I/O that used to be handled by 8 disks, so size attracting query and churn is a negative! Striping allows the bandwidth of many drives to be applied to the combined storage, with supports more buffering with faster buffer fills, if things are sequential often enough. If everything was sequential and failure was no worry, you could stipe all together for max bandwidth, but you might do better with 2 or more virtual volumes so copying, database joining and such can be sequential on each virtual device. So, there are sometimes ways to force smart parallelism, the ability to join huge sets without seeks. However, RAM and 64 bit VM have made buffering so ample that it may dilute that sort of approach. RAID has not entirely freed us from failure worry, since with all the layers of software and hardware and vendors, it seems RAID errors often never get heard until they are 2 devices down. Rebuild time is not inconsequential, either. So, your approach should go beyond hot spots to maximizing the bandwidth of a managable number of virtual volumes. Along the way, look at the pathways and how they figure into the redundancy and striping. If a controller handles both sides of a mirror, and goes wonky . . . . If striping runs across all controllers, scsi cables, then any controller or cable bottleneck is diluted. Intellegent use of simple mirror for high churn and RAID-N for low churn is nice, too! Sometimes, this discussion can be extended down into the app, as DB2 append tables with insert never update or delete are churn free except at the end. Disk is cheap and 100% history is wise. Churn-free data might even migrate to some hierarchical read-only store like DVD arrays. Assuming control of chaos is someone else's job can be a luxury.

But, yeah, it seems like it is still good, but might not be sufficient, and an approach with sufficiency might not make it necessary.
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IOSTAT(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 						 IOSTAT(8)

NAME
iostat -- report I/O statistics SYNOPSIS
iostat [-CdhIKoTxz?] [-c count] [-M core] [-n devs] [-N system] [-t type,if,pass] [-w wait] [drives] DESCRIPTION
The iostat utility displays kernel I/O statistics on terminal, device and cpu operations. The first statistics that are printed are averaged over the system uptime. To get information about the current activity, a suitable wait time should be specified, so that the subsequent sets of printed statistics will be averaged over that time. The options are as follows: -c Repeat the display count times. If no repeat count is specified, the default depends on whether -w is specified. With -w the default repeat count is infinity, otherwise it is 1. -C Display CPU statistics. This is on by default, unless -d or -x is specified. -d Display only device statistics. If this flag is turned on, only device statistics will be displayed, unless -C or -T is also specified to enable the display of CPU or TTY statistics. -h Put iostat in 'top' mode. In this mode, iostat will show devices in order from highest to lowest bytes per measurement cycle. -I Display total statistics for a given time period, rather than average statistics for each second during that time period. -K In the blocks transferred display (-o), display block count in kilobytes rather then the device native block size. -M Extract values associated with the name list from the specified core instead of the default ``/dev/kmem''. -n Display up to devs number of devices. The iostat utility will display fewer devices if there are not devs devices present. -N Extract the name list from the specified system instead of the default ``/boot/kernel/kernel''. -o Display old-style iostat device statistics. Sectors per second, transfers per second, and milliseconds per seek are displayed. If -I is specified, total blocks/sectors, total transfers, and milliseconds per seek are displayed. -t Specify which types of devices to display. There are three different categories of devices: device type: da Direct Access devices sa Sequential Access devices printer Printers proc Processor devices worm Write Once Read Multiple devices cd CD devices scanner Scanner devices optical Optical Memory devices changer Medium Changer devices comm Communication devices array Storage Array devices enclosure Enclosure Services devices floppy Floppy devices interface: IDE Integrated Drive Electronics devices SCSI Small Computer System Interface devices other Any other device interface passthrough: pass Passthrough devices The user must specify at least one device type, and may specify at most one device type from each category. Multiple device types in a single device type statement must be separated by commas. Any number of -t arguments may be specified on the command line. All -t arguments are ORed together to form a matching expression against which all devices in the system are compared. Any device that fully matches any -t argument will be included in the iostat output, up to the number of devices that can be displayed in 80 columns, or the maximum number of devices specified by the user. -T Display TTY statistics. This is on by default, unless -d or -x is specified. -w Pause wait seconds between each display. If no wait interval is specified, the default is 1 second. The iostat command will accept and honor a non-integer number of seconds. Note that the interval only has millisecond granularity. Finer values will be truncated. E.g., ``-w1.0001'' is the same as ``-w1.000''. The interval will also suffer from modifications to kern.hz so your mileage may vary. -x Show extended disk statistics. Each disk is displayed on a line of its own with all available statistics. If this flag is turned on, only disk statistics will be displayed, unless -C or -T is also specified to enable the display of CPU or TTY statistics. -z If -x is specified, omit lines for devices with no activity. -? Display a usage statement and exit. The iostat utility displays its information in the following format: tty tin characters read from terminals tout characters written to terminals devices Device operations. The header of the field is the device name and unit number. The iostat utility will display as many devices as will fit in a standard 80 column screen, or the maximum number of devices in the system, whichever is smaller. If -n is specified on the command line, iostat will display the smaller of the requested number of devices, and the maximum number of devices in the system. To force iostat to display specific drives, their names may be supplied on the command line. The iostat utility will not display more devices than will fit in an 80 column screen, unless the -n argument is given on the command line to specify a maximum number of devices to display. If fewer devices are specified on the command line than will fit in an 80 column screen, iostat will show only the specified devices. The standard iostat device display shows the following statistics: KB/t kilobytes per transfer tps transfers per second MB/s megabytes per second The standard iostat device display, with the -I flag specified, shows the following statistics: KB/t kilobytes per transfer xfrs total number of transfers MB total number of megabytes transferred The extended iostat device display, with the -x flag specified, shows the following statistics: r/s read operations per second w/s write operations per second kr/s kilobytes read per second kw/s kilobytes write per second qlen transactions queue length svc_t average duration of transactions, in milliseconds %b % of time the device had one or more outstanding transactions The extended iostat device display, with the -x and -I flags specified, shows the following statistics: r/i read operations per time period w/i write operations per time period kr/i kilobytes read per time period kw/i kilobytes write per time period qlen transactions queue length tsvc_t/i total duration of transactions per time period, in seconds sb/i total time the device had one or more outstanding transactions per time period, in seconds The old-style iostat display (using -o) shows the following statistics: sps sectors transferred per second tps transfers per second msps average milliseconds per transaction The old-style iostat display, with the -I flag specified, shows the following statistics: blk total blocks/sectors transferred xfr total transfers msps average milliseconds per transaction cpu us % of cpu time in user mode ni % of cpu time in user mode running niced processes sy % of cpu time in system mode in % of cpu time in interrupt mode id % of cpu time in idle mode FILES
/boot/kernel/kernel Default kernel namelist. /dev/kmem Default memory file. EXAMPLES
iostat -w 1 da0 da1 cd0 Display statistics for the first two Direct Access devices and the first CDROM device every second ad infinitum. iostat -c 2 Display the statistics for the first four devices in the system twice, with a one second display interval. iostat -t da -t cd -w 1 Display statistics for all CDROM and Direct Access devices every second ad infinitum. iostat -t da,scsi,pass -t cd,scsi,pass Display statistics once for all SCSI passthrough devices that provide access to either Direct Access or CDROM devices. iostat -h -n 8 -w 1 Display up to 8 devices with the most I/O every second ad infinitum. iostat -dh -t da -w 1 Omit the TTY and CPU displays, show devices in order of performance and show only Direct Access devices every second ad infinitum. iostat -Iw 3 Display total statistics every three seconds ad infinitum. iostat -odICTw 2 -c 9 Display total statistics using the old-style output format 9 times, with a two second interval between each measurement/display. The -d flag generally disables the TTY and CPU displays, but since the -T and -C flags are given, the TTY and CPU displays will be displayed. SEE ALSO
fstat(1), netstat(1), nfsstat(1), ps(1), systat(1), devstat(3), gstat(8), pstat(8), vmstat(8) The sections starting with ``Interpreting system activity'' in Installing and Operating 4.3BSD. HISTORY
This version of iostat first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. AUTHORS
Kenneth Merry <ken@FreeBSD.org> BUGS
The use of iostat as a debugging tool for crash dumps is probably limited because there is currently no way to get statistics that only cover the time immediately before the crash. BSD
December 15, 2012 BSD
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