Individual program measurement

Many tools are available for measuring the resource consumption of individual programs. Some of these programs are capable of more comprehensive workload measurements as well, but are too intrusive for use on production systems.

Most of these tools are discussed in depth in the sections that discuss tuning for minimum consumption of specific resources. Some of the more prominent are:

svmon

Measures the real memory used by a process. Discussed in Memory usage.

time

Measures the elapsed execution time and CPU consumption of an individual program. Discussed in Using the time command to measure microprocessor use.

tprof

Measures the relative CPU consumption of programs, subroutine libraries, and the operating system's kernel. Discussed in Profiling tools section of the Performance Tools Guide and Reference.

vmstat -s

Measures the I/O load generated by a program. Discussed in Assessing overall disk I/O with the vmstat command.