Sponsored Content
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
This User Gave Thanks to bakunin For This Post:
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. AIX

Hard disk usage is 100 Percent Busy for any command

hi, AIX 5.3 For any command(say tar command) I am getting 100% busy for my hdisk. But my CPU and Memory is not busy and have more idle also. Please advice for any performance analysing. Thanks in Advance, (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: npcrao
3 Replies

2. Shell Programming and Scripting

Detailed disk usage versus age summary

Hi, I'm posting my question here as I fele that what I am about to try to do must have been done already, and I don't want to re-invent the wheel. I have recently become responsible for monitoring disk space usage for a large file system. I would like to geenrate reports that will summise... (8 Replies)
Discussion started by: littleIdiot
8 Replies

3. Shell Programming and Scripting

ksh - AIX: get epoch time/age for a file?

Hi, (AIX 5.1) Is there any way to find the epoch timestamp for a file without having to use fancy perl (or similar) scripts? If anyone knows of a way to do this using just ksh commands it would be appreciated. (It also appears I don't have the stat command available). Alternatively is... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: b0bbins
3 Replies

4. AIX

all pseudo ttys busy, AIX 5.2

I have several users connecting via a Windows-based SSH\telnet client. The previous sysadmin used FacetTerm to allow certain users to switch between multiple "windows." I'm told there are AIX-native ways to do this but I work with what I inherited. Originally, many users were still connecting... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: lacroix
3 Replies

5. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Filesystem mystery: disks are not busy on one machine, very busy on a similar box

Hi, We have a filesystem mystery on our hands. Given: 2 machines, A and Aa. Machine Aa is the problem machine. Machine A is running Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.22.9 #1 SMP Wed Feb 20 08:46:16 CST 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux. Machine Aa is running RHEL5.3, kernel 2.6.18-128.el5 #1 SMP Wed Dec 17 11:41:38... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: mschwage
2 Replies

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

Age of file in storage / disk

Hello all, Below is scripts to find the file following by: 30 days <- How many total file space within 30 days and not quantity 90 days 120 days 1 year From here also I can get data space to put on PIE Chart. Following this scripts can I do some enhance from this scripts like do... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: sheikh76
1 Replies

7. Linux

How to Calculate Disk Queue length and Disk Busy Time

Hi, Am doing an enhancements related to monitoring a Linux disk I/O statistics. The /proc/diskstats file is used to get the each disk I/O statistics. But, It returns the raw value. How to calculate the Disk Queue Length and Disk Busy time from the raw values. Guide me. (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: maruthu
1 Replies

8. AIX

Clone or mirror your AIX OS larger disk to smaller disk ?

hello folks, I have a 300GB ROOTVG volume groups with one filesystem /backup having 200GB allocated space Now, I cannot alt disk clone or mirrorvg this hdisk with another smaller disk. The disk size has to be 300GB; I tried alt disk clone and mirrorvg , it doesn't work. you cannot copy LVs as... (9 Replies)
Discussion started by: filosophizer
9 Replies

9. AIX

Topas total Disk Busy %

Hi Everyone, anyone know how to derive the value for the total disk busy % (shown in topas ) ? Thanks. Best Regards, ckwan (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: ckwan
1 Replies

10. AIX

Command to check the busy % for a hard disk device like hdisk5

Please help with command to check the busy % for a hard disk device like hdisk5 Best regards, Vishal (7 Replies)
Discussion started by: Vishal_dba
7 Replies
BLK_INIT_QUEUE(9)						   Block Devices						 BLK_INIT_QUEUE(9)

NAME
blk_init_queue - prepare a request queue for use with a block device SYNOPSIS
struct request_queue * blk_init_queue(request_fn_proc * rfn, spinlock_t * lock); ARGUMENTS
rfn The function to be called to process requests that have been placed on the queue. lock Request queue spin lock DESCRIPTION
If a block device wishes to use the standard request handling procedures, which sorts requests and coalesces adjacent requests, then it must call blk_init_queue. The function rfn will be called when there are requests on the queue that need to be processed. If the device supports plugging, then rfn may not be called immediately when requests are available on the queue, but may be called at some time later instead. Plugged queues are generally unplugged when a buffer belonging to one of the requests on the queue is needed, or due to memory pressure. rfn is not required, or even expected, to remove all requests off the queue, but only as many as it can handle at a time. If it does leave requests on the queue, it is responsible for arranging that the requests get dealt with eventually. The queue spin lock must be held while manipulating the requests on the request queue; this lock will be taken also from interrupt context, so irq disabling is needed for it. Function returns a pointer to the initialized request queue, or NULL if it didn't succeed. NOTE
blk_init_queue must be paired with a blk_cleanup_queue call when the block device is deactivated (such as at module unload). COPYRIGHT
Kernel Hackers Manual 3.10 June 2014 BLK_INIT_QUEUE(9)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 10:47 AM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy