Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How to do it...

The pidstat application has several options for generating different reports:

• -d: This reports IO statistics
• -r: This reports page faults and memory utilization
• -u: This reports CPU utilization
• -w: This reports task switches

Report Context Switch activity:

    $ pidstat -w | head -5
    Linux 2.6.32-642.11.1.el6.x86_64 (rtdaserver.cflynt.com)    
    02/15/2017  _x86_64_ (12 CPU)

    11:18:35 AM       PID   cswch/s nvcswch/s  Command
    11:18:35 AM         1      0.00      0.00  init
    11:18:35 AM         2      0.00      0.00  kthreadd

The pidstat application sorts its report by the PID number. The data can be re-organized with the sort utility. The following command displays the five applications that generate the most context switches per second (Field 4 in the -w output):

 $ pidstat ...