Posts Tagged ‘iostat’

Checking I/O Hard Disk (Overhead) Read / Write operations on Microsoft Windows 7 – Resource Monitor

Friday, July 26th, 2013

I mainly have to deal with Linux servers. Today however I had to check for problems Microsoft Windows 7 server. The machine looked Okay but was reading from hard drive all the time. Hence I needed to check what is the Hard disk approximate read / write speed per second. I know on lInux tracking i/o hard disk server bottlenecks is done with iostat or dstat.

However I never did that on Windows, so I had to learn it by experience. Its actually pretty easy and you don't even need to install external program to see read / write hdd speed operations. Windows 7 is bundled with a Program called Resource Manager. Running Resource Manager's easiest method is from Windows Task Manager, i.e.:

Windows 7 Task Manager processes performance tab - how to check hard drive bottleneck windows server
Press Ctrl + Alt + Del (Choose Start Task Manager) and from Task Manager click on Resource Monitor Button.
Immediately resource Monitor pops up and selecting the Disk tab priovides information on HDD Read / Write speed per sec. Using Resource Monitor, you can quickly also see which process is creating the most HDD overhead for server.

microsoft windows 7 resource monitor screenshot

windows resource monitor disk tab hard disk show read write speed win7

Though I'm not Microsoft fan, I should admit Resource Manager does a great job.

 

Top AIX UNIX Performance tracking commands every Linux admin / user should know

Monday, March 16th, 2015

IBM_AIX_UNIX-Performance-Tracking-every-commands-Linux-sysadmin-and-user-should-know-AIX_logo

Though IBM AIX is basicly UNIX OS and many of the standard Linux commands are same or similar to AIX's if you happen to be a Linux sysadmin and you've been given some 100 AIX servers,  you will have to invest some time to read on AIX, however as a starter you should be aware to at least be able to do performance tracking on system to prevent system overloads. If that's the case I advise you check thoroughfully below commands documentation.

fcstat – Displays statistics gathered by the specified Fibre Channel device driver

filemon – Performance statistics for files, logical/physical volumes and virtual memory segments

fileplace – Displays the placement of file blocks within logical or physical volumes.

entstat – Displays the statistics gathered by the specified Ethernet device driver

iostat – Statistics for ttys, disks and cpu ipcs – Status of interprocess communication facilities

lsps – Statistics about paging space

netstat – Shows network status

netpmon – Performance statistics for CPU usage, network device-driver I/O, socket calls & NFS

nfsstat – Displays information about NFS and RPC calls

pagesize – Displays system page size ps – Display status of current processes

pstat – Statistics about system attributes

sar – System Activity Recorder

svmon – Captures a snapshot of the current contents of both real and virtual memory

traceroute – intended for use in network testing, measurement, and management.

tprof – Detailed profile of CPU usage by an application vmstat – Statistics about virtual memory and cpu/hard disk usage

topas – AIX euqivalent of Linux top command

Here are also useful examples use of above AIX performance tracking commands

To display the statistics for Fiber Channel device driver fcs0, enter:

fcstat fcs0

To monitor the activity at all file system levels and write a verbose report to the fmon.out file, enter:

filemon -v -o fmon.out -O all

To display all information about the placement of a file on its physical volumes, enter:

fileplace -piv data1

To display a continuous disk report at two second intervals for the disk with the logical name disk1, enter the following command:

iostat -d disk1 2

To display extended drive report for all disks, enter the following command:

iostat -D

To list the characteristics of all paging spaces, enter:

lsps -a

List All Ports (both listening and non listening ports)

netstat -a | more

The netpmon command uses the trace facility to obtain a detailed picture of network activity during a time interval.

netpmon -o /tmp/netpmon.log -O all;

netpfmon is very much like AIX Linux equivalent of tcpdump To print all of the supported page size with an alphabetical suffix, enter:

pagesize -af

To display the i-nodes of the system dump saved in the dumpfile core file

pstat -i dumpfile

To report current tty activity for each 2 seconds for the next 40 seconds, enter the following command:

sar -y -r 2 20

To watch system unit for 10 minutes and sort data, enter the following command:

sar -o temp 60 10

To report processor activity for the first two processors, enter the following command:

sar -u -P 0,1

To display global statistics for virtual memory in a one line format every minute for 30 minutes, enter the following command:

svmon -G -O summary=longreal -i 60 30

The traceroute command is intended for use in network testing, measurement, and management. While the ping command confirms IP network reachability, you cannot pinpoint and improve some isolated problems

traceroute aix1

Basic global program and thread-level summary / Reports processor usage

prof -x sleep 10

Single process level profiling

tprof -u -p workload -x workload

Reports virtual memory statistics

vmstat 10 10

To display fork statistics, enter the following command:

vmstat -f

To display the count of various events, enter the following command: vmstat -s To display the count of various events, enter the following command:

vmstat -s

To display time-stamp next to each column of output of vmstat, enter the following command:

vmstat -t

To display the I/O oriented view with an alternative set of columns, enter the following command:

vmstat -I

To display all the VMM statistics available, enter the following command:

vmstat -vs


If you already have some experience with some BSD (OpenBSD or FreeBSD) you will feel much more confortable with AIX as both operating system share common ancestor OS (UNIX System V), actually IBM AIX is U. System V with 4.3 BSD compatible extensions. As AIX was the first OS to introduce file system journalling, journalling capabilities on AIX are superb. AIX was and is still widely used by IBM for their mainframes, on IBM RS/6000 series (in 1990s), nowdays it runs fine on PowerPC-based systems and IA-64 systems.
For GUI loving users which end up on AIX try out SMIT (System Management Interface tool for AIX). AIX was using bash shell in prior versions up to AIX 3 but in recent releases default shell is Korn Shell (ksh88).
Nowdays AIX just like HP-UX and rest of commercial UNICes are loosing ground as most of functionalities is provided by commercial Linux distributions like RHEL so most of clients including Banks and big business clients are migrating to Linux.


Happy AIX-ing ! 🙂

Tracking I/O hard disk server bottlenecks with iostat on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Hard disk overhead tracking on Linux and FreeBSD with iostat

I've earlier wrote an article How to find which processes are causing hard disk i/o overhead on Linux there I explained very rawly few tools which can be used to benchmark hard disk read / write operations. My prior article accent was on iotop and dstat and it just mentioned of iostat. Therefore I've wrote this short article in attempt to explain a bit more thoroughfully on how iostat can be used to track problems with excessive server I/O read/writes.

Here is the command man page description;
iostatReport Central Processing Unit (CPU) statistics and input/output statistics for devices, partitions and network filesystems

I will further proceed with few words on how iostat can be installed on various Linux distros, then point at few most common scenarious of use and a short explanation on the meaning of each of the command outputs.

1. Installing iostat on Linux

iostat is a swiss army knife of finding a server hard disk bottlenecks. Though it is a must have tool in the admin outfut, most of Linux distributions will not have iostat installed by default.
To have it on your server, you will need to install sysstat package:

a) On Debian / Ubuntu and other Debian GNU / Linux derivatives to install sysstat:

debian:~# apt-get --yes install sysstat

b) On Fedora, CentOS, RHEL etc. install is with yum:

[root@centos ~]# yum -y install sysstat

c) On Slackware Linux sysstat package which contains iostat is installed by default. 

d) In FreeBSD, there is no need for installation of any external package as iostat is part of the BSD world (bundle commands).
I should mention bsd iostat and Linux's iostat commands are not the same and hence there use to track down hard disk bottlenecks differs a bit, however the general logic of use is very similar as with most tools in BSD and Linux.

2. Checking a server hard disk for i/o disk bottlenecks on G* / Linux

Once having the sysstat installed on G* / Linux systems, the iostat command will be added in /usr/bin/iostat
a) To check what is the hard disk read writes per second (in megabytes) use:

debian:~# /usr/bin/iostat -m
Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (debian) 03/27/2012 _x86_64_ (8 CPU)
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
15.34 0.36 2.76 2.66 0.00 78.88
Device: tps MB_read/s MB_wrtn/s MB_read MB_wrtn
sda 63.89 0.48 8.20 6730223 115541235
sdb 64.12 0.44 8.23 6244683 116039483
md0 2118.70 0.22 8.19 3041643 115528074

In the above output the server, where I issue the command is using sda and sdb configured in software RAID 1 array visible in the output as (md0)

The output of iostat should already be easily to read, for anyone who didn't used the tool here is a few lines explanation of the columns:

The %user 15.34 meaning is that 15.34 out of 100% possible i/o load is generad by system level read/write operations.
%nice – >Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level with nice priority.
%iowait – just like the top command idle it shows the idle time when the system didn't have an outstanding disk I/O requests.
%steal – show percentage in time spent in time wait of CPU or virtual CPUs to service another virtual processor (high numbers of disk is sure sign for i/o problem).
%idle – almost the same as meaning to %iowait
tps – HDD transactions per second
MB_read/s (column) – shows the actual Disk reads in Mbytes at the time of issuing iostat
MB_wrtn/s – displays the writes p/s at the time of iostat invocation
MB_read – shows the hard disk read operations in megabytes, since the server boot 'till moment of invocation of iostat
MB_wrtn – gives the number of Megabytes written on HDD since the last server boot filesystem mount

The reason why the Read / Write values for sda and sdb are similar in this example output is because my disks are configured in software RAID1 (mirror)

The above iostat output reveals in my specific case the server is experiencing mostly Disk writes (observable in the high MB_wrtn/s 8.19 md0 in the above sample output).

It also reveals, the I/O reads experienced on that server hard disk are mostly generated as a system (user level load) – see (%user 15.34 and md0 2118.70).

For all those not familiar with system also called user / level load, this is all kind of load which is generated by running programs on the server – (any kind of load not generated by the Linux kernel or loaded kernel modules).

b) To periodically keep an eye on HDD i/o operations with iostat, there are two ways:

– Use watch in conjunction with iostat;

[root@centos ~]# watch "/usr/bin/iostat -m"
Every 2.0s: iostat -m Tue Mar 27 11:00:30 2012
Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (centos) 03/27/2012 _x86_64_ (8 CPU)
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
15.34 0.36 2.76 2.66 0.00 78.88
Device: tps MB_read/s MB_wrtn/s MB_read MB_wrtn
sda 63.89 0.48 8.20 6730255 115574152
sdb 64.12 0.44 8.23 6244718 116072400
md0 2118.94 0.22 8.20 3041710 115560990
Device: tps MB_read/s MB_wrtn/s MB_read MB_wrtn
sda 55.00 0.01 25.75 0 51
sdb 52.50 0.00 24.75 0 49
md0 34661.00 0.01 135.38 0 270

Even though watch use and -d might appear like identical, they're not watch does refresh the screen, executing instruction similar to the clear command which clears screen on every 2 seconds, so the output looks like the top command refresh, while passing the -d 2 will output the iostat command output on every 2 secs in a row so all the data is visualized on the screen. Hence -d 2 in cases, where more thorough debug is necessery is better. However for a quick routine view watch + iostat is great too.

c) Outputting extra information for HDD input/output operations;

root@debian:~# iostat -x
Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (debian) 03/27/2012 _x86_64_ (8 CPU)
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
15.34 0.36 2.76 2.66 0.00 78.88
Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
sda 4.22 2047.33 12.01 51.88 977.44 16785.96 278.03 0.28 4.35 3.87 24.72
sdb 3.80 2047.61 11.97 52.15 906.93 16858.32 277.05 0.03 5.25 3.87 24.84
md0 0.00 0.00 20.72 2098.28 441.75 16784.05 8.13 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

This command will output extended useful Hard Disk info like;
r/s – number of read requests issued per second
w/s – number of write requests issued per second
rsec/s – numbers of sector reads per second
b>wsec/s – number of sectors wrote per second
etc. etc.

Most of ppl will never need to use this, but it is good to know it exists.

3. Tracking read / write (i/o) hard disk bottlenecks on FreeBSD

BSD's iostat is a bit different in terms of output and arguments.

a) Here is most basic use:

freebsd# /usr/sbin/iostat
tty ad0 cpu
tin tout KB/t tps MB/s us ni sy in id
1 561 45.18 44 1.95 14 0 5 0 82

b) Periodic watch of hdd i/o operations;

freebsd# iostat -c 10
tty ad0 cpu
tin tout KB/t tps MB/s us ni sy in id
1 562 45.19 44 1.95 14 0 5 0 82
0 307 51.96 113 5.73 44 0 24 0 32
0 234 58.12 98 5.56 16 0 7 0 77
0 43 0.00 0 0.00 1 0 0 0 99
0 485 0.00 0 0.00 2 0 0 0 98
0 43 0.00 0 0.00 0 0 1 0 99
0 43 0.00 0 0.00 0 0 0 0 100
...

As you see in the output, there is information like in the columns tty, tin, tout which is a bit hard to comprehend.
Thanksfully the tool has an option to print out only more essential i/o information:

freebsd# iostat -d -c 10
ad0
KB/t tps MB/s
45.19 44 1.95
58.12 97 5.52
54.81 108 5.78
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
20.48 25 0.50

The output info is quite self-explanatory.

Displaying a number of iostat values for hard disk reads can be also achieved by omitting -c option with:

freebsd# iostat -d 1 10
...

Tracking a specific hard disk partiotion with iostat is done with:

freebsd# iostat -n /dev/ad0s1a
tty cpu
tin tout us ni sy in id
1 577 14 0 5 0 81
c) Getting Hard disk read/write information with gstat

gstat is a FreeBSD tool to print statistics for GEOM disks. Its default behaviour is to refresh the screen in a similar fashion like top command, so its great for people who would like to periodically check all attached system hard disk and storage devices:

freebsd# gstat
dT: 1.002s w: 1.000s
L(q) ops/s r/s kBps ms/r w/s kBps ms/w %busy Name
0 10 0 0 0.0 10 260 2.6 15.6| ad0
0 10 0 0 0.0 10 260 2.6 11.4| ad0s1
0 10 0 0 0.0 10 260 2.8 12.5| ad0s1a
0 0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 20.0| ad0s1b
0 0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0| ad0s1c
0 0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0| ad0s1d
0 0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0| ad0s1e
0 0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0| acd0

It even has colors if your tty supports colors 🙂

Another useful tool in debugging the culprit of excessive hdd I/O operations is procstat command:

Here is a sample procstat run to track (httpd) one of my processes imposing i/o hdd load:

freebsd# procstat -f 50404
PID COMM FD T V FLAGS REF OFFSET PRO NAME
50404 httpd cwd v d -------- - - - /
50404 httpd root v d -------- - - - /
50404 httpd 0 v c r------- 56 0 - -
50404 httpd 1 v c -w------ 56 0 - -
50404 httpd 2 v r -wa----- 56 75581 - /var/log/httpd-error.log
50404 httpd 3 s - rw------ 105 0 TCP ::.80 ::.0
50404 httpd 4 p - rw---n-- 56 0 - -
50404 httpd 5 p - rw------ 56 0 - -
50404 httpd 6 v r -wa----- 56 25161132 - /var/log/httpd-access.log
50404 httpd 7 v r rw------ 56 0 - /tmp/apr8QUOUW
50404 httpd 8 v r -w------ 56 0 - /var/run/accept.lock.49588
50404 httpd 9 v r -w------ 1 0 - /var/run/accept.lock.49588
50404 httpd 10 v r -w------ 1 0 - /tmp/apr8QUOUW
50404 httpd 11 ? - -------- 2 0 - -

Btw fstat is sometimes helpful in identifying the number of open files and trying to estimate which ones are putting the hdd load.
Hope this info helps someone. If you know better ways to track hdd excessive loads on Linux / BSD pls share 'em pls.