Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Measuring the Kernel

This section explains how you can use the tools provided to monitor the algorithms described earlier in this chapter.

The sar utility has a huge number of options and some very powerful capabilities. One of its best features is that you can log its full output in date-stamped binary form to a file. You can even look at a few selected measures interactively, then go back to look at all the other measures if you need to. sar generates average values automatically and can be used to produce averages between specified start and end times from a binary file. Many of the sar options have already been described in “Vnodes, Inodes, and Rnodes” on page 360 and “Understanding vmstat and sar Output” on page 320.

One particularly useful ...