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sar(1)                                   BSD General Commands Manual                                  sar(1)

NAME
     sar -- system activity reporter

SYNOPSIS
     sar [-dgpu] [-n mode] [-o filename] t [n]
     sar [-dgpu] [-n mode] [-e time] [-f filename] [-i seconds] [-s time]

DESCRIPTION
     The sar command is used to sample and report various cumulative statistic counters maintained by the
     operating system.  It can be invoked in two different ways.

     In the first usage instance, n samples are reported at t second intervals.  If n is not specified, only
     one sample will be captured.  When the -o option is specified, sar will write the binary sampling data
     to the output file specified by filename.

     In the second usage instance, there is no on-going sample interval to specify.  This is because the
     sampling input comes from a previously recorded, binary activity file.  The binary activity file can be
     specified using the -f filename option.  When the -f option isn't used, sar attempts to open a default
     binary activity file, /var/log/sa/sadd, where dd represents the current day of the month.

     The starting and ending time of the report can be restricted using the -e and -s options.  Here, the
     time field is specified in the form hh[:mm[:ss]].

     Finally, the -i option can be used to select the sampling interval.  Only records at least seconds
     apart will be reported.  When the -i option is not used, all of the previously recorded interval sam-ples samples
     ples are reported.

     Due to the nature of on-going sample collection, the data is reported in a verbose mode when more than
     one sampling option is specified.  Column headers are printed at the beginning of the report; averages
     are printed when the sar command terminates.

OPTIONS
     The following options restrict the sample set that sar reports.

     -d       Report disk activity.

              device   The BSD name of the device.

              r+w/s    The number of reads and writes per second.

              blks/s   Number of blocks (in device's default blocksize) transferred to a device per second.

     -g       Report page-out activity.

              pgout/s  The number of pages paged out per second.

     -p       Report page-in and page fault activity

              pgin/s   The number of pages paged in per second.

              pflts/s  The number of faults that caused a page to be copied in per second.

              vflts/s  The number of times vm_fault routine has been called.

     -n mode  Report network activity with modes DEV, EDEV, or PPP.  Multiple network modes can be speci-fied. specified.
              fied.

              DEV      The DEV mode reports network device statistics.  The following information is dis-played displayed
                       played for each interface.

                       IFACE     The network interface name.

                       Ipkts/s   The number of packets received per second.

                       Ibytes/s  The number of bytes received per second.

                       Opkts/s   The number of packets sent per second.

                       Obytes/s  The number of bytes sent per second.

              EDEV     The EDEV mode reports network device error statistics. The following information is
                       displayed for each interface.

                       IFACE    The interface name.

                       Ierrs/s  The input errors per second.

                       Oerrs/s  The output errors per second.

                       Coll/s   The collisions that occurred per second.

                       Drops/s  The number of dropped packets per second.

              PPP      The PPP mode must be specified in order to display ppp connections in the network
                       statistics. This will also turn on the PPP modify mode in sadc (8) when sampling data
                       is not being read from a file.  By default, both the collection and reporting of ppp
                       statistics is turned off.  See sadc (8).

     -u       Report CPU activity (default)

              %usr, %sys, and %idle

              These report the percentage of time running in user mode, system mode and idle.

FILES
     /var/log/sa/sadd  Default daily activity file that holds the binary sampling data.  dd are digits that
                       represent the day of the month.

SEE ALSO
     fs_usage(1), netstat(1), sc_usage(1), top(1), vm_stat(1), iostat(8), sa1(8), sa2(8), sadc(8)

Mac OS X                                        Jul 25, 2003                                        Mac OS X

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