> As I understand it, prstat was originally created as > a Sun version of top. Would it not be better to take > this opportunity to merge the 2? > > I prefer top as it has the ability to kill processes > and the summary information it gives. Unfortunately > there are things that top doesn't report on - like > microstate accounting. > > My own preference, FWIW, would be to simply ship top > proper alongside prstat in OpenSolaris 2008.11, then > merge prstat-only functionality into top for future > versions, pushing the changes upstream.
You may want to reconsider the notion of merging them, unless a _lot_ of work was done, and go with just having both, distinct, instead. ISTR discussion (Usenet?) of "top" being a pig with lots of processes, because it didn't hold the /proc/*/psinfo (or whatever) files open, but closed and reopened them each pass, so as to be more scalable in some other respect. If that's more or less correct, "top" would have far more of an effect on what it measures than "prstat" would, which is sometimes (to say the least) unhelpful. Not to mention that a few people running "top" simultaneously could cause performance issues (in which case it might be wise to rethink even having "top" at all, unless it's not publically executable). In other words, to combine them would not only mean combining visible features, but also reconciling good performance/minimal impact of "prstat" with whatever other consideration that led to "top" being implemented the way it was. PS I think that one (but perhaps not the only) such discussion of "top" performance was http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.solaris/browse_thread/thread/17f7a3823eea8130/973516b25b349680 This message posted from opensolaris.org
