The vmstat -s command

The summary option, -s, sends a summary report to standard output starting from system initialization expressed in absolute counts rather than on an interval basis.

The recommended way of using these statistics is to run this command before a workload, save the output, and then run it again after the workload and save its output. The next step is to determine the difference between the two sets of output. An awk script called vmstatit that does this automatically is provided in Disk or memory-related problem.

# vmstat -s
  3231543 total address trans. faults
    63623 page ins
   383540 page outs
      149 paging space page ins
      832 paging space page outs
        0 total reclaims
   807729 zero filled pages faults
     4450 executable filled pages faults
   429258 pages examined by clock
        8 revolutions of the clock hand
   175846 pages freed by the clock
    18975 backtracks
        0 lock misses
       40 free frame waits
        0 extend XPT waits
    16984 pending I/O waits
   186443 start I/Os
   186443 iodones
141695229 cpu context switches
317690215 device interrupts
        0 software interrupts
        0 traps
 55102397 syscalls

The page-in and page-out numbers in the summary represent virtual memory activity to page in or out pages from page space and file space. The paging space ins and outs are representative of only page space.