What's New in Managing System Performance?

This section describes new Solaris 8 features in the area of managing system performance.

SPARC: busstat

A new system monitoring tool, busstat, provides command line access to the bus-related hardware performance counters in the system. It enables the gathering of system-wide bus performance statistics directly from the system hardware. The current list of supported hardware is SBus, AC and PCI devices. These are all SPARC system devices. Currently, there are no IA supported devices.

The busstat command enables the measurement of system-wide statistics such as memory bank reads/writes, clock cycles, number of interrupts, streaming DVMA read/write transfers etc.

Superuser can use busstat to program these counters. Ordinary users can only read counters programmed previously by superuser.

The busstat command lists the devices in a system that are found to support these hardware performance counters. If no supported devices are found in the system, the following message is displayed:

busstat: No devices available in system. 

See busstat(1M) for more information on using this monitoring tool.

The cpustat and cputrack Commands

You can use the new cpustat and cputrack commands for monitoring the performance of a system or a process.

The cpustat command gathers system-wide CPU information. This command must be run by the superuser. The cputrack command is similar to the truss command for displaying information about an application or a process. This command can be run by regular users.

Developers can create their own versions of these monitoring tools by using the same library APIs that were used to build the cpustat command.

See cpustat(1M) and cputrack(1) for more information.

prstat

The prstat command displays information about active processes on the system. You can specify whether you want information on specific processes, UIDs, CPU IDs, or processor sets. By default, prstat displays information about all processes sorted by CPU usage.

You can display detailed process microstate accounting information with prstat -m, which provides the percentage of time the process has spent processing system traps, text page faults, data page faults, and waiting for CPU, also known as CPU latency time.

See prstat(1M) for more information.

Obsolete Interprocess Communication Parameters

The Interprocess Communication (IPC) Message facility has been made more scalable in the Solaris 8 release by using kmem_alloc(9F) rather than rmalloc(9F) to allocate message text.

Therefore, the previously-documented msginfo_msgssz, msginfo_msgmap, and msginfo_msgseg tunables, which were artifacts of the rmalloc-based implementation, are obsolete in this release.