In the first instance, sar samples cumulative activity counters in the operating system at n intervals of t seconds, where t should be 5 or greater. If t is specified with more than one option, all headers are printed together and the output may be difficult to read. (If the sampling interval is less than 5, the activity of sar itself may affect the sample.) If the -o option is specified, it saves the samples in filename in binary format. The default value of n is 1.

In the second instance, no sampling interval is specified. sar extracts data from a previously recorded filename, either the one specified by the -f option or, by default, the standard system activity daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd for the current day dd. The starting and ending times of the report can be bounded using the -e and -s arguments with time specified in the form hh[:mm[:ss]]. The -i option selects records at sec second intervals. Otherwise, all intervals found in the data file are reported.

The following options modify the subsets of information reported by sar.

-a

Report use of file access system routines: iget/s, namei/s, dirblk/s

-A

Report all data. Equivalent to -abcdgkmpqruvwy.

-b

Report buffer activity:

bread/s, bwrit/s

transfers per second of data between system buffers and disk or other block devices.

lread/s, lwrit/s

accesses of system buffers.

%rcache, %wcache

cache hit ratios, that is, (1-bread/lread) as a percentage.

pread/s, pwrit/s

transfers using raw (physical) device mechanism.

-c

Report system calls:

scall/s

system calls of all types.

sread/s, swrit/s, fork/s, exec/s

specific system calls.

rchar/s, wchar/s

characters transferred by read and write system calls. No incoming or outgoing exec(2) and fork(2) calls are reported.

-d

Report activity for each block device (for example, disk or tape drive) with the exception of XDC disks and tape drives. When data is displayed, the device specification dsk- is generally used to represent a disk drive. The device specification used to represent a tape drive is machine dependent. The activity data reported is:

%busy, avque

portion of time device was busy servicing a transfer request, average number of requests outstanding during that time.

read/s, write/s, blks/s

number of read/write transfers from or to device, number of bytes transferred in 512-byte units.

avwait

average wait time in milliseconds.

avserv

average service time in milliseconds.

For more general system statistics, use iostat(1M), sar(1M), or vmstat(1M).

See System Administration Guide: Basic Administration for naming conventions for disks.

-e time

Select data up to time. Default is 18:00.

-f filename

Use filename as the data source for sar. Default is the current daily data file /var/adm/sa/sadd.

-g

Report paging activities:

pgout/s

page-out requests per second.

ppgout/s

pages paged-out per second.

pgfree/s

pages per second placed on the free list by the page stealing daemon.

pgscan/s

pages per second scanned by the page stealing daemon.

%ufs_ipf

the percentage of UFS inodes taken off the freelist by iget which had reusable pages associated with them. These pages are flushed and cannot be reclaimed by processes. Thus, this is the percentage of igets with page flushes.

-i sec

Select data at intervals as close as possible to sec seconds.

-k

Report kernel memory allocation (KMA) activities:

sml_mem, alloc, fail

information about the memory pool reserving and allocating space for small requests: the amount of memory in bytes KMA has for the small pool, the number of bytes allocated to satisfy requests for small amounts of memory, and the number of requests for small amounts of memory that were not satisfied (failed).

lg_mem, alloc, fail

information for the large memory pool (analogous to the information for the small memory pool).

ovsz_alloc, fail

the amount of memory allocated for oversize requests and the number of oversize requests which could not be satisfied (because oversized memory is allocated dynamically, there is not a pool).

-m

Report message and semaphore activities:

msg/s, sema/s

primitives per second.

-o filename

Save samples in file, filename, in binary format.

-p

Report paging activities:

atch/s

page faults per second that are satisfied by reclaiming a page currently in memory (attaches per second).

pgin/s

page-in requests per second.

ppgin/s

pages paged-in per second.

pflt/s

page faults from protection errors per second (illegal access to page) or "copy-on-writes".

vflt/s

address translation page faults per second (valid page not in memory).

slock/s

faults per second caused by software lock requests requiring physical I/O.

-q

Report average queue length while occupied, and percent of time occupied:

runq-sz, %runocc

run queue of processes in memory and runnable.

swpq-sz, %swpocc

these are no longer reported by sar.

-r

Report unused memory pages and disk blocks:

freemem

average pages available to user processes.

freeswap

disk blocks available for page swapping.

-s time

Select data later than time in the form hh[:mm]. Default is 08:00.

-u

Report CPU utilization (the default):

%usr, %sys, %wio, %idle

portion of time running in user mode, running in system mode, idle with some process waiting for block I/O, and otherwise idle.

-v

Report status of process, i-node, file tables:

proc-sz, inod-sz, file-sz, lock-sz

entries/size for each table, evaluated once at sampling point.

ov

overflows that occur between sampling points for each table.

-w

Report system swapping and switching activity:

swpin/s, swpot/s, bswin/s, bswot/s

number of transfers and number of 512-byte units transferred for swapins and swapouts (including initial loading of some programs).

pswch/s

process switches.

-y

Report TTY device activity:

rawch/s, canch/s, outch/s

input character rate, input character rate processed by canon, output character rate.

rcvin/s, xmtin/s, mdmin/s

receive, transmit and modem interrupt rates.

/var/adm/sa/sadd

daily data file, where dd are digits representing the day of the month

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

sag(1), iostat(1M), sar(1M), vmstat(1M), exec(2), fork(2), attributes(5)

System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

The sum of CPU utilization might vary slightly from 100 because of rounding errors in the production of a percentage figure.