[nycbug-talk] Mac OSX Troubleshooting tools

[Bob Ippolito]

On Dec 18, 2004, at 1:43 PM, G. Rosamond wrote:

> On Dec 18, 2004, at 1:40 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Isaac Levy wrote:
>>
>>> ikebook:/Users/ike ike$ iostat
>>> iostat: sysctl(kern.tty_nin) failed: No such file or directory
>>> iostat: disabling TTY statistics
>>>          disk0       cpu
>>>  KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id
>>>  9.76   1  0.01  13  6 81
>>>
>>> --
>>> Could be me- will investigate eventually...
>>
>> Not just you:
>>
>> [oof:~/Desktop] spork$ iostat
>> iostat: sysctl(kern.tty_nin) failed: No such file or directory
>> iostat: disabling TTY statistics
>>           disk0           disk1       cpu
>>   KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id
>>  26.10   1  0.02   4.67   0  0.00   8  3 89
>> [oof:~/Desktop] spork$ uname -a
>> Darwin oof.local 7.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.6.0: Sun Oct 10 
>> 12:05:27 PDT 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.9.4.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC  Power 
>> Macintosh powerpc
>>
>> I'll have to give it a try in Tiger next time I boot to it.
>
> [gman at GMans-Computer gman]$ iostat
> iostat: sysctl(kern.tty_nin) failed: No such file or directory
> iostat: disabling TTY statistics
>           disk0       cpu
>   KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id
>  15.17   8  0.11  16  6 78
> [gman at GMans-Computer gman]$ uname -a
> Darwin GMans-Computer.local 7.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.7.0: Sun Nov 
>  7 16:06:51 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.9.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC  Power 
> Macintosh powerpc
> [gman at GMans-Computer gman]$

The man page says that iostat gives you some metric of system 
statistics averaged over your uptime.  It doesn't really say much about 
the performance of your machine, it's really more of a "how much stuff 
did you compile today?" kind of statistic :)

If you pass it a wait argument, *and* you are putting some serious I/O 
load on your machine, then you might see something useful.. but it sure 
seems like this is the wrong tool for this job.

-bob