How to Monitor Linux System Performance

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How to Monitor Linux System Performance

When you are the system administrator, you should monitor how well your Linux system is performing. You can monitor the overall performance of your Linux system by looking at information such as

  • CPU usage
  • Physical memory usage
  • Virtual memory usage (swap space)
  • Use the hard disk

Linux comes with utilities that you can use to monitor these performance parameters. Keep reading to check out a few of these utilities and explain how to understand the information provided by the mentioned utilities.
Use the top tool in Linux
To display the best CPU processes – the ones that take up the most CPU time – you can use the top text mode utility. To start this utility, type the top in a terminal window (or text console). The top utility displays a text screen that lists current processes, sorted by CPU usage, along with various other information, such as memory usage and swap space.
The highest usefulness of Linux
You can see the best CPU operations using the top utility.
The top tool refreshes the screen every 5 seconds. If the window keeps running at the top, you can constantly monitor the status of your Linux system. To exit from the top, press Q, press Ctrl + C, or close the Terminal window.
The first five lines of the output screen provide brief information about the system, as follows:

  • The first line shows the current time, how long the system has been running, the number of logged-in users, and three load averages – the average number of processes ready to run over the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

 

  • The second line lists the total number of processes/tasks and the status of these processes.

 

  • The third line shows CPU usage – what percentage of CPU time are used by user processes, what percentage of system processes (kernels), and what percentage of time the CPU is idle.

 

  • The fourth line shows how physical memory is being used – the total amount, the amount used, the amount available, and the amount allocated to buffers (for reading from the hard disk, for example).

 

  • The fifth line shows how virtual memory (or swap space) is used – total swap space, how much is used, how much is available, and how much is cached.

The table below the summary information lists information about the current processes, arranged in descending order by the amount of CPU time used. The table below summarizes the meanings of the column headings in the table above.

Column Headings in top Utility’s Output
Heading                     Meaning
PID                             Process ID of the process.
USER                         Username under which the process is running.
PR                               Priority of the process.
NI                                Nice value of the process. The value ranges from –20 (highest priority) to
19 (lowest priority), and the default is 0. (The nice value represents the
relative priority of the process: The higher the value, the lower the priority
and the nicer the process, because it yields to other processes.)
VIRT                          Total amount of virtual memory used by the process, in kilobytes.
RES                            Total physical memory used by a task (typically shown in kilobytes, but an
m suffix indicates megabytes).
SHR                           Amount of shared memory used by the process.
S                                  State of the process (S for sleeping, D for uninterruptible sleep, R for
running, Z for zombies — processes that should be dead but are still
running — and T for stopped).
%CPU                        Percentage of CPU time used since the last screen update
%MEM                      Percentage of physical memory used by the process.
TIME+                      Total CPU time the process has used since it started.
COMMAND             Shortened form of the command that started the process.

Using the uptime command in Linux
You can use the uptime command to get a summary of the system’s state. Just type the command like this:
uptime
It displays output similar to the following:
15:03:21 up 32 days, 57 min, 3 users, load average: 0.13, 0.23, 0.27
This output shows the current time, how long the system has been up, the number of users, and (finally) the three load averages — the average number of processes that were ready to run in the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. Load averages greater than 1 imply that many processes are competing for CPU time simultaneously.
The load averages give you an indication of how busy the system is.
Using the vmstat utility in Linux
You can get summary information about the overall system usage with the vmstat utility. To view system usage information averaged over 5-second intervals, type the following command (the second argument indicates the total number of lines of output vmstat displays):
vmstat 5 8
You see output similar to the following listing:
procs ———–memory———- —swap– —–io—- –system– —-cpu—-
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 0 31324 4016 18568 136004 1 1 17 16 8 110 33 4 61 1
0 1 31324 2520 15348 139692 0 0 7798 199 1157 377 8 8 6 78
1 0 31324 1584 12936 141480 0 19 5784 105 1099 437 12 5 0 82
2 0 31324 1928 13004 137136 7 0 1586 138 1104 561 43 6 0 51
3 1 31324 1484 13148 132064 0 0 1260 51 1080 427 50 5 0 46
0 0 31324 1804 13240 127976 0 0 1126 46 1082 782 19 5 47 30
0 0 31324 1900 13240 127976 0 0 0 0 1010 211 3 1 96 0
0 0 31324 1916 13248 127976 0 0 0 10 1015 224 3 2 95 0
The first line of output shows the averages since the last reboot. After that line, vmstat displays the 5-second average data seven more times, covering the next 35 seconds. The tabular output is grouped as six categories of information, indicated by the fields in the first line of output. The second line shows further details for each of the six major fields. You can interpret these fields by using the table below.
Meaning of Fields in the vmstat Utility’s Output
Field                                 Name Description
procs                                Number of processes and their types: r = processes waiting to run, b = processes
in uninterruptible sleep, and w = processes swapped out but ready to run.
memory                           Information about physical memory and swap-space usage (all numbers in
kilobytes): swpd = virtual memory used, free = free physical memory, buff =
memory used as buffers, and cache = virtual memory that’s cached.
swap                                 Amount of swapping (the numbers are in kilobytes per second): si = amount of
memory swapped in from disk, and so = amount of memory swapped to disk.
io                                      Information about input and output. (The numbers are in blocks per second,
where the block size depends on the disk device.) bi = rate of blocks sent to disk,
and bo = rate of blocks received from disk.
system                            Information about the system: in = number of interrupts per second (including
clock interrupts), and cs = number of context switches per second — how many
times the kernel changed which process was running.
cpu                                 Percentages of CPU time used: us = percentage of CPU time used by user
processes, sy = percentage of CPU time used by system processes, id =
percentage of time CPU is idle, and wa = time spent waiting for input or output
(I/O).
In the vmstat utility’s output, high values in the si and so fields indicate too much swapping. (Swapping refers to the copying of information between physical memory and the virtual memory on the hard drive.) High numbers in the bi and bo fields indicate too much disk activity.
Checking disk performance and disk usage in Linux systems
Linux comes with the /sbin/hdparm program to control IDE or ATAPI hard drives, which are common on PCs. One feature of the hdparm program allows you to use the -t option to determine the rate at which data is read from the disk into a buffer in memory. Here’s the result of typing /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda on one system:
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 178 MB in 3.03 seconds = 58.81 MB/sec
The command requires the IDE drive’s device name (/dev/hda for the first hard drive and /dev/hdb for the second hard drive) as an argument. If you have an IDE hard drive, you can try this command to see how fast data is read from your system’s disk drive.
To display the space available in the currently mounted file systems, use the df command. If you want a more readable output from df, type the following command:
df -h

Here’s typical output from this command:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 7.1G 3.9G 2.9G 59% /
/dev/hda3 99M 18M 77M 19% /boot
none 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/scd0 2.6G 0 100% /media/cdrecorder

As this example shows, the -h option causes the df command to display the sizes in gigabytes (G) and megabytes (M).
To check the disk space being used by a specific directory, use the du command. You can specify the -h option to view the output in kilobytes (K) and megabytes (M), as shown in the following example:
du -h /var/log
Here’s typical output from that command:
152K /var/log/cups
4.0K /var/log/vbox
4.0K /var/log/httpd
508K /var/log/gdm
4.0K /var/log/samba
8.0K /var/log/mail
4.0K /var/log/news/OLD
8.0K /var/log/news
4.0K /var/log/squid
2.2M /var/log
The du command displays the disk space used by each directory, and the last line shows the total disk space used by that directory. If you want to see only the total space used by a directory, use the -s option. Type du -sh /home to see the space used by the /home directory, for example. The command produces output that looks like this:
89M /home

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