Solaris

I need to try to document the resources used when ftping files from server a to server b verses just mounting the file system from server a to server b and reading the files directly. We're copying a database from server a to server b and the current process is to copy each table to a flat file, ftp the flat files to server b and copy the flat files into the database on server b. I think we could just do a database backup of the database on server a to a file system that is mounted on server b and use that backup to load the database on server b. This database is about 30G in size. Currently the ftp process takes about 18 hours to unload, ftp, and load the database. The mount process should take less than 2 hours to backup and load the database.
Like I say I need to document the resources used on server a. It's not a matter of speed but a question of what impact this new process could have on server a. Any links to information or tests I could run to document this?

Thanks.

That entirely depends on what you are running and what hardware you have. This sounds to me like a lab project, where you set up a server A and a server B exactly how they are in in production, including network, and do a few runs using ftp then a few runs using NFS, all while checking what's happening with the systems.

If only we had the luxury of such a lab. I can run some tests on the production environment in the off hours however. Aside from looking at iostat, vmstat, and netstat are there any other utilities I can use that would demonstrate what is happening with the system?

prstat ... you may want to install top -you can get as a package from sunfreeware- which gives you a nice view of all 4 stat commands.

vdbench, sar, top, and Dtrace if you're running 5.10