Linux – Measuring system calls per second in Linux

kernellinuxperformance-monitoring

Is there a way to measure the total number of system calls per second on a Linux system?

strace gives counts, but only for a single process.
It looks like some versions of sar support this, but the one I have only shows context switches/sec or forks/sec. I'm running a 2.6.9-89 based kernel.

Best Answer

You could look into writing a SystemTap script. There is even an example script that could be modified to meet your needs.

Related Solutions

Find out which task is generating a lot of context switches on linux

Well, quite interesting case. Try observing watch -tdn1 cat /proc/interrupts. Do you see any valuable changes there?

Linux – Determining Which Process Is Causing Heavy Disk I/O

iotop (link) for starter ;) I haven't seen you posting an output of it.

1: I have experienced almost the same situation with a logging filesystem and atime - however with more writes.

Try to remount with noatime and turn off filesystem logging (later for testing only) in order to see if it's filesystem based and as said, iotop if it's process based.

2: I guess this partition is not part of a just-rebuilding raid array, is it?

3: If you are having a lot of very small files (a lot smaller than the actual block device blocksize and/or the filesystem blocksize), and you are reading those small files, you end up reading entire blocks from the system, and most of those blocks will be read for nothing.

4: If nothing helps above, you can always get the list of files accessed by executing

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump

please note that it degrades system performance by a lot. Instructions are available in my previous post here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Find out which task is generating a lot of context switches on linux

Linux – Determining Which Process Is Causing Heavy Disk I/O

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