[nycbug-talk] Performance analyzis/monitoring

[Francisco Reyes]

15 days into my first FreeBSD admin job.
A lot of it has been learning what the company does, where everything is..

Now that I am starting to settle a little bit actually get to start 
looking at long term issues instead of all the daily small "fires".


Performance analyzis/monitoring is my next big job to tackle.
Any recommended readings? So far looked at the tuning man page.

So far when a machine is underperforming I look at:
top
systat -io
w
swapinfo

Plan to re-read the vmstat page (have not looked at it on a while). also 
have to re-read/look at systat -vmstat too.

Any other recommended programs to check performance? Specially to check 
Swap (don't find systat -swap very usefull either). Have several machines 
indicating usage of swap over 100MB

So far sorting "top" swap by memory and resident size, but that just shows 
what programs are using the most memory.. no way to tell if those are the ones 
that actually hit the swap.

Also what are acceptable values for w?
Looking at archives I see recommendations of 2 for single cpu, 3-4 for 
dual CPU. I have machines that during their normal operating are between 2 
and 5 for their 15 minute average with high fluctuations in the 5 minute.