mpstat - Report processors related statistics.

mpstat [ -P { cpu | ALL } ] [ -V ] [ interval [ count ] ]

The mpstat command writes to standard output activities for each available processor, processor 0 being the first one. Global average activities among all processors are also reported. The mpstat command can be used both on SMP and UP machines, but in the latter, only global average activities will be printed.

The interval parameter specifies the amount of time in seconds between each report. A value of 0 indicates that processors statistics are to be reported for the time since system startup (boot). The count parameter can be specified in conjunction with the interval parameter if this one is not set to zero. The value of count determines the number of reports generated at interval seconds apart. If the interval parameter is specified without the count parameter, the mpstat command generates reports continuously.

The report generated by the mpstat command has the following format:

CPU Processor number. The keyword all indicates that statistics are calculated as averages among all processors. %user Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level (application). %nice Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level with nice priority. %sys Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the system level (kernel). Note that this does not include time spent servicing interrupts or softirqs. %iowait Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle during which the system had an outstanding disk I/O request. %irq Show the percentage of time spent by the CPU or CPUs to service interrupts. %soft Show the percentage of time spent by the CPU or CPUs to service softirqs. A softirq (software interrupt) is one of up to 32 enumerated software interrupts which can run on multiple CPUs at once. %steal Show the percentage of time spent in involuntary wait by the virtual CPU or CPUs while the hypervisor was servicing another virtual processor. %idle Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle and the system did not have an outstanding disk I/O request. intr/s Show the total number of interrupts received per second by the CPU or CPUs.

-P { cpu | ALL }

Indicate the processor number for which statistics are to be reported. cpu is the processor number. Note that processor 0 is the first processor. The ALL keyword indicates that statistics are to be reported for all processors.

-V

Print version number then exit.

The mpstat command takes into account the following environment variable:

S_TIME_FORMAT

If this variable exists and its value is ISO then the current locale will be ignored when printing the date in the report header. The mpstat command will use the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) instead.

mpstat 2 5 Display five reports of global statistics among all processors at two second intervals.

mpstat -P ALL 2 5 Display five reports of statistics for all processors at two second intervals.

/proc filesystem must be mounted for the mpstat command to work.

Only a few activities are supplied by the Linux kernel for each processor.

/proc contains various files with system statistics.

Sebastien Godard (sysstat <at> wanadoo.fr)

sar(1), sadc(8), sa1(8), sa2(8), sadf(1), iostat(1), vmstat(8)

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/