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Operating Systems AIX Need to know %age disk busy on AIX Post 302887758 by bakunin on Monday 10th of February 2014 04:35:57 PM
Old 02-10-2014
Note, though, that "%tt_act" is NOT meaning the disk is taxed this amount of its bandwidth capacity. Especially "100%" does NOT MEAN it is at its limit.

It is like this: the disk (in fact its driver, but nevermind) maintains a queue where commands (like "fetch me some data", etc.) are stored until being executed. In regular intervals the OS queries the disk if this queue is empty or not. The "yes - empty"-answers and "no, not empty"-answers are computed to form a percentage and this percentage is "%tt_act".

While this value is indeed needed to assess the busyness of a disk it is meaningless if it is not combined with other data like averagy queue depth, size of the average read transaction and similar values.

Picture a movie theatres ticket counter: every 5 minutes you ask the clerk if there are people waiting in his queue or not. You do NOT ask if the queue is long or short, if the average customer buys one ticket or several, etc.. From the "yes" (queue bigger than 0) and "no" (queue is exactly 0) answers you compile the "busy" value, but it will not tell you how many people are watching the movie. For this you would need the other mentioned number too.

Back to the disk: if the disk is drowned in many very little requests it might be at 100% but the queue depth will always be very short and in fact a dramatic increase in requests will just make the average queue length a little bigger.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
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drv_usecwait(9F)					   Kernel Functions for Drivers 					  drv_usecwait(9F)

NAME
drv_usecwait - busy-wait for specified interval SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/ddi.h> void drv_usecwait(clock_t microsecs); INTERFACE LEVEL
Architecture independent level 1 (DDI/DKI). PARAMETERS
microsecs The number of microseconds to busy-wait. DESCRIPTION
drv_usecwait() gives drivers a means of busy-waiting for a specified microsecond count. The amount of time spent busy-waiting may be greater than the microsecond count but will minimally be the number of microseconds specified. delay(9F) can be used by a driver to delay for a specified number of system ticks, but it has two limitations. First, the granularity of the wait time is limited to one clock tick, which may be more time than is needed for the delay. Second, delay(9F) may only be invoked from user context and hence cannot be used at interrupt time or system initialization. Often, drivers need to delay for only a few microseconds, waiting for a write to a device register to be picked up by the device. In this case, even in user context, delay(9F) produces too long a wait period. CONTEXT
drv_usecwait() can be called from user or interrupt context. SEE ALSO
delay(9F), timeout(9F), untimeout(9F) Writing Device Drivers NOTES
The driver wastes processor time by making this call since drv_usecwait() does not block but simply busy-waits. The driver should only make calls to drv_usecwait() as needed, and only for as much time as needed. drv_usecwait() does not mask out interrupts. SunOS 5.10 12 Nov 1992 drv_usecwait(9F)
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