Re: Perspective monitoring method for Linux.

"Mladen Gogala" <mgogala.SPAM_ME.NOT_at_verizon.net> wrote in message news:pan.2007.07.08.01.59.24_at_verizon.net...
> I was recently investigating methods for answering the eternal
> question: who is generating all that @#$% I/O, with particular
> accent on the Oracle databases. Linux is not particularly good
> when it comes to answering questions like that. However, there
> are some possibilities. More information can be found in the following
> article:
>
> http://www.mladen-gogala.com/oratap.pdf
>

Whether you'd want to run systemtap on a production server is another question. It does look a very promising technology but the cowards among us might prefer to let others get the bugs out.

You can get a rough idea of what process is reading most by seeing what is causing most page faults. In linux with a newish version of top, you can sort by page faults: hit shift-F then select page fault count from the menu.

In Solaris 8 onwards you can get this data from prstat -mL.

Clearly this is nothing like what you can get from dtrace or systemtap but it might be good enough in most cases.

-- 
John.