HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks

To compare memory use by the processes currently running, run ps -efl. Look under
the SZ column of the resulting display.
Measuring Performance
The saying, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” is especially true of system
and workgroup performance. Here are some ways to gauge your workgroup’s
performance against the “Guidelines” (page 192) earlier in this section.
Checking Disk Load with sar and iostat
To see how disk activity is distributed across your disks, run sar -d with a time
interval and frequency, for example:
sar -d 5 10
This runs sar -d ten times with a five-second sampling interval. The %busy column
shows the percentage of time the disk (device) was busy during the sampling interval.
Compare the numbers for each of the disks the shared file systems occupy (note the
Average at the end of the report).
Another way to sample disk activity is to run iostat with a time interval, for example:
iostat 5
This will report activity every five seconds. Look at the bps and sps columns for the
disks (device) that hold shared file systems. bps shows the number of kilobytes
transferred per second during the period; sps shows the number of seeks per second
(ignore msps).
If some disks with shared file systems are consistently much busier than others, you
should consider redistributing the load. See HP-UX System Administrator’s Guide: Logical
Volume Management.
NOTE: On disks managed by the Logical Volume Manager (LVM), it can be hard to
keep track of what file systems reside on what disks. It’s a good idea to create hardcopy
diagrams of your servers’ disks; see HP-UX System Administrator’s Guide: Logical Volume
Management.
Checking NFS Server/Client Block Size
In the case of an HFS file system, the client’s NFS read/write block size should match
the block size for that file system on the server.
• On the NFS server, you can use dumpfs to check the block size for an HFS file
system; for example:
dumpfs /work | grep bsize
In the resulting output, bsize is the block size, in bytes, of the file system /work.
194 Managing System Performance