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AIX 5L Problem Determination - IBM Redbooks

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tty: tin tout avg-cpu: % user % sys % idle % iowait<br />

0.0 192.7 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0<br />

Disks: % tm_act Kbps tps Kb_read Kb_wrtn<br />

hdisk1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0<br />

hdisk3 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0<br />

hdisk2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0<br />

cd0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0<br />

In such a case, statistics can be turned on with the following command:<br />

# chdev -l sys0 -a iostat=true<br />

sys0 changed<br />

The disks column<br />

The disks column shows the names of the physical volumes. They are either<br />

hdisk or cd, followed by a number. If physical volume names are specified with<br />

the iostat command, only those names specified are displayed.<br />

The %tm_act column<br />

The %tm_act column indicates the percentage of time that the physical disk was<br />

active (bandwidth utilization for the drive) or, in other words, the total time disk<br />

requests are outstanding. A drive is active during data transfer and command<br />

processing, such as seeking a new location. The disk active time percentage is<br />

directly proportional to resource contention and inversely proportional to<br />

performance. As disk use increases, performance decreases, and response time<br />

increases.<br />

In general, when the utilization exceeds 70 percent, processes are waiting longer<br />

than necessary for I/O to complete, because most UNIX processes block (or<br />

sleep) while waiting for their I/O requests to complete. Look for busy versus idle<br />

drives. Moving data from busy to idle drives can help alleviate a disk bottleneck.<br />

Paging to and from disk will contribute to the I/O load.<br />

The Kbps column<br />

The Kbps column indicates the amount of data transferred (read or written) to the<br />

drive in KB per second. This is the sum of Kb_read plus Kb_wrtn, divided by the<br />

seconds in the reporting interval.<br />

The tps column<br />

The tps column indicates the number of transfers per second that were issued to<br />

the physical disk. A transfer is an I/O request through the device driver level to<br />

the physical disk. Multiple logical requests can be combined into a single I/O<br />

request to the disk. A transfer is of indeterminate size.<br />

262 <strong>IBM</strong> ^ Certification Study Guide - <strong>AIX</strong> <strong>5L</strong> <strong>Problem</strong> <strong>Determination</strong> Tools and Techniques

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