BSD Today: Monitoring the health of your system with systat -vmstat

[ Thanks to Jeremy
Reed for this link. ]

“Ever wonder whether you have enough RAM in your system?
Whether your system is well-tuned? Where its CPU time is
going? Several commands, including top and lsof, offer some
help. But perhaps the best — and the one that many system
administrators keep onscreen at all times — is the command systat
-vmstat, which lets you track system loading, memory usage, and
peripheral activity all at once.”

“The screen snapshot on this page shows a typical screen
generated by FreeBSD 3.4’s systat -vmstat command. (In other
versions, it’s slightly different, but the layout is similar in all
Berkeley-derived UNIX-like operating systems.) As you can see, the
display is packed with useful information — ranging from memory
and disk I/O statistics to a graphical display of system loading.
This display normally updates every few seconds or so; you can set
the number of seconds between updates via an optional command line
parameter. The statistics you’ll see are for the one second just
before the screen was refreshed.”

Complete
Story