Measuring a partial workload on a production system
By partial workload, we mean measuring a part of the production system's workload for possible transfer to or duplication on a different system.
Because this is a production system, we must be as unobtrusive as possible. At the same time, we must analyze the workload in more detail to distinguish between the parts we are interested in and those we are not. To do a partial measurement, we must discover what the workload elements of interest have in common. Are they:
- The same program or a small set of related programs?
- Work performed by one or more specific users of the system?
- Work that comes from one or more specific terminals?
Depending on the commonality, we could use one of the following
# ps -ef | grep pgmname
# ps -fuusername, . . .
# ps -ftttyname, . . .to identify the processes of interest and report the cumulative CPU time consumption of those processes. We can then use the svmon command (judiciously) to assess the memory use of the processes.