Continuous performance monitoring with the vmstat command

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The vmstat command is useful for obtaining an overall picture of CPU, paging, and memory usage.

The following is a sample report produced by the vmstat command:

# vmstat 5 2
kthr     memory             page              faults        cpu     
----- ----------- ------------------------ ------------ -----------
 r  b   avm   fre  re  pi  po  fr   sr  cy  in   sy  cs us sy id wa 
 1  1 197167 477552   0   0   0   7   21   0 106 1114 451  0  0 99  0
 0  0 197178 477541   0   0   0   0    0   0 443 1123 442  0  0 99  0

Remember that the first report from the vmstat command displays cumulative activity since the last system boot. The second report shows activity for the first 5-second interval.

For detailed discussions of the vmstat command, see vmstat command, Memory usage determination with the vmstat command, and Assessing disk performance with the vmstat command.