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Full Discussion: HP-UX and 'top'
Operating Systems HP-UX HP-UX and 'top' Post 78696 by deckard on Thursday 21st of July 2005 12:53:13 PM
Old 07-21-2005
Data HP-UX and 'top'

I've been working with an HP-UX system (RP5400 Series PA-RISC server) for about a year that hosts some middleware. The middleware sits between an Oracle DB (on another box) and the client applications running on about 800 PCs. From the beginning, I've noticed that 'top' reports between 0.0% and 10% Idle during the day. Seeing that this is the first big production Unix server I've ever worked with, I believe that these Idle times are WAY too low. However, the application vendor told us that 0% idle should be OK as long as it doesn't stay there. Another support person at the application vendor, however, told me that we should be seeing between 30-60% Idle during the day! My gut feeling is that if it drops below 20% consistently, there is probably a resource issue. Here is a typical 'top' screen from our system in the middle of the day:

Code:
System: unix_srv1                                       Thu Jul 21 12:26:53 2005
Load averages: 5.46, 3.90, 3.19
1285 processes: 1259 sleeping, 25 running, 1 zombie
Cpu states:
CPU   LOAD   USER   NICE    SYS   IDLE  BLOCK  SWAIT   INTR   SSYS
 0    5.38  64.0%   5.9%  30.2%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%
 1    6.83  79.4%   0.0%  20.6%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%
 2    4.65  82.5%   0.0%  17.5%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%
 3    4.98  69.7%   3.8%  26.5%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%
---   ----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
avg   5.46  74.0%   2.4%  23.6%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%   0.0%

I've been monitoring with 'sar' as well and keeping a month's worth of 'sar' output in 15 minute intervals. A lot of what I see with 'sar' seems to reflect what I see with 'top', so I believe we are being pegged for CPU time by the user load. WIth all of this said, my base question is... what IS a reasonable Idle value/range on a Unix box? I've never actually seen this stated anywhere and I imagine it probably varies, but there should be some cushion, shouldn't there?

Last edited by deckard; 07-21-2005 at 06:07 PM..
 

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sar(1)							    BSD General Commands Manual 						    sar(1)

NAME
sar -- system activity reporter SYNOPSIS
sar [-dgpu] [-n mode] [-o filename] t [n] sar [-dgpu] [-n mode] [-e time] [-f filename] [-i seconds] [-s time] DESCRIPTION
The sar command is used to sample and report various cumulative statistic counters maintained by the operating system. It can be invoked in two different ways. In the first usage instance, n samples are reported at t second intervals. If n is not specified, only one sample will be captured. When the -o option is specified, sar will write the binary sampling data to the output file specified by filename. In the second usage instance, there is no on-going sample interval to specify. This is because the sampling input comes from a previously recorded, binary activity file. The binary activity file can be specified using the -f filename option. When the -f option isn't used, sar attempts to open a default binary activity file, /var/log/sa/sadd, where dd represents the current day of the month. The starting and ending time of the report can be restricted using the -e and -s options. Here, the time field is specified in the form hh[:mm[:ss]]. Finally, the -i option can be used to select the sampling interval. Only records at least seconds apart will be reported. When the -i option is not used, all of the previously recorded interval samples are reported. Due to the nature of on-going sample collection, the data is reported in a verbose mode when more than one sampling option is specified. Column headers are printed at the beginning of the report and averages are printed when the sar command terminates. OPTIONS
The following options restrict the sample set that sar reports. -d Report disk activity. device The BSD name of the device. r+w/s The number of reads and writes per second. blks/s Number of blocks (in device's default blocksize) transferred to a device per second. -g Report page-out activity. pgout/s The number of pages paged out per second. -p Report page-in and page fault activity pgin/s The number of pages paged in per second. pflts/s The number of faults that caused a page to be copied in per second. vflts/s The number of times vm_fault routine has been called. -n mode Report network activity with modes DEV, EDEV, or PPP. Multiple network modes can be specified. DEV The DEV mode reports network device statistics. The following information is displayed for each interface. IFACE The network interface name. Ipkts/s The number of packets received per second. Ibytes/s The number of bytes received per second. Opkts/s The number of packets sent per second. Obytes/s The number of bytes sent per second. EDEV The EDEV mode reports network device error statistics. The following information is displayed for each interface. IFACE The interface name. Ierrs/s The input errors per second. Oerrs/s The output errors per second. Coll/s The collisions that occurred per second. Drops/s The number of dropped packets per second. PPP The PPP mode must be specified in order to display ppp connections in the network statistics. This will also turn on the PPP modify mode in sadc (8) when sampling data is not being read from a file. By default, both the collection and report- ing of ppp statistics is turned off. See sadc (8). -u Report CPU activity (default) %usr, %sys, and %idle These report the percentage of time running in user mode, system mode and idle. FILES
/var/log/sa/sadd Default daily activity file that holds the binary sampling data. dd are digits that represent the day of the month. SEE ALSO
sa1(8), sa2(8), sadc(8), iostat(8), vm_stat(1), netstat(1), top(1), sc_usage(1), fs_usage(1) Mac OS X Jul 25, 2003 Mac OS X
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