VMSTAT - in the limited metrics it provides it manages to mix stats based on pages, blocks and kilobytes. All without telling anyone.
Swap is only used for dirty anonymous storage. Given that (nearly) all that swap is one way, I'd be guessing that a lot of it is contained in the swap cache - your swap usage is only slowly growing. As an adjunct to what Mark added to the %wa discussion - there is no (direct) correlation between %wa and tasks actually waiting for the I/O to complete. Probable maybe, but not necessary. Linux has awful (performance) metrics - perf counters may help in the future. Be a while before they are available in Enterprise kernels, and only the Böblingen folks will be able to tell you if s390x will (ever) be supported. Or, if/when they are, if they'll be available as a z/VM guest, or only in LPAR mode. Shane ... On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 08:49 -0500, Mrohs, Ray wrote: > Hi, > We are running SLES10 and WebSphere on 1 IFL and 2G storage. These > bursts of activity seem to happen every few hours. > Is occasional swapping in the thousands too high if its going to VDISK? > What can cause the high 'wa' values? Our info is limited since this is a > test partition with no VM performance monitoring (yet). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
