cpustat(1M) System Administration Commands cpustat(1M)NAMEcpustat - monitor system behavior using CPU performance counters
SYNOPSIScpustat-c eventspec [-c eventspec]... [-p period] [-sntD] [ interval
[count]]
cpustat-h
DESCRIPTION
The cpustat utility allows CPU performance counters to be used to moni‐
tor the overall behavior of the CPUs in the system.
If interval is specified, cpustat samples activity every interval sec‐
onds, repeating forever. If a count is specified, the statistics are
repeated count times. If neither are specified, an interval of five
seconds is used, and there is no limit to the number of samples that
are taken.
OPTIONS
The following options are supported:
-c eventspec Specifies a set of events for the CPU performance coun‐
ters to monitor. The syntax of these event specifica‐
tions is:
[picn=]eventn[,attr[n][=val]][,[picn=]eventn
[,attr[n][=val]],...,]
You can use the -h option to obtain a list of available
events and attributes. This causes generation of the
usage message. You can omit an explicit counter assign‐
ment, in which case cpustat attempts to choose a capa‐
ble counter automatically.
Attribute values can be expressed in hexadecimal,
octal, or decimal notation, in a format suitable for
strtoll(3C). An attribute present in the event specifi‐
cation without an explicit value receives a default
value of 1. An attribute without a corresponding
counter number is applied to all counters in the speci‐
fication.
The semantics of these event specifications can be
determined by reading the CPU manufacturer's documenta‐
tion for the events.
Multiple -c options can be specified, in which case the
command cycles between the different event settings on
each sample.
-D Enables debug mode.
-h Prints an extensive help message on how to use the
utility and how to program the processor-dependent
counters.
-p period Causes cpustat to cycle through the list of eventspecs
every period seconds. The tool sleeps after each cycle
until period seconds have elapsed since the first
eventspec was measured.
When this option is present, the optional count parame‐
ter specifies the number of total cycles to make
(instead of the number of total samples to take). If
period is less than the number of eventspecs times
interval, the tool acts as it period is 0.
-s Creates an idle soaker thread to spin while system-only
eventspecs are bound. One idle soaker thread is bound
to each CPU in the current processor set. System-only
eventspecs contain both the nouser and the sys tokens
and measure events that occur while the CPU is operat‐
ing in privileged mode. This option prevents the ker‐
nel's idle loop from running and triggering system-mode
events.
-n Omits all header output (useful if cpustat is the
beginning of a pipeline).
-t Prints an additional column of processor cycle counts,
if available on the current architecture.
USAGE
A closely related utility, cputrack(1), can be used to monitor the
behavior of individual applications with little or no interference from
other activities on the system.
The cpustat utility must be run by the super-user, as there is an
intrinsic conflict between the use of the CPU performance counters sys‐
tem-wide by cpustat and the use of the CPU performance counters to mon‐
itor an individual process (for example, by cputrack.)
Once any instance of this utility has started, no further per-process
or per-LWP use of the counters is allowed until the last instance of
the utility terminates.
The times printed by the command correspond to the wallclock time when
the hardware counters were actually sampled, instead of when the pro‐
gram told the kernel to sample them. The time is derived from the same
timebase as gethrtime(3C).
The processor cycle counts enabled by the -t option always apply to
both user and system modes, regardless of the settings applied to the
performance counter registers.
On some hardware platforms running in system mode using the "sys"
token, the counters are implemented using 32-bit registers. While the
kernel attempts to catch all overflows to synthesize 64-bit counters,
because of hardware implementation restrictions, overflows can be lost
unless the sampling interval is kept short enough. The events most
prone to wrap are those that count processor clock cycles. If such an
event is of interest, sampling should occur frequently so that less
than 4 billion clock cycles can occur between samples.
The output of cpustat is designed to be readily parseable by nawk(1)
and perl(1), thereby allowing performance tools to be composed by
embedding cpustat in scripts. Alternatively, tools can be constructed
directly using the same APIs that cpustat is built upon using the
facilities of libcpc(3LIB). See cpc(3CPC).
The cpustat utility only monitors the CPUs that are accessible to it in
the current processor set. Thus, several instances of the utility can
be running on the CPUs in different processor sets. See psrset(1M) for
more information about processor sets.
Because cpustat uses LWPs bound to CPUs, the utility might have to be
terminated before the configuration of the relevant processor can be
changed.
EXAMPLES
SPARC
Example 1: Measuring External Cache References and Misses
The following example measures misses and references in the external
cache. These occur while the processor is operating in user mode on an
UltraSPARC machine.
example% cpustat-c EC_ref,EC_misses 1 3
time cpu event pic0 pic1
1.008 0 tick 69284 1647
1.008 1 tick 43284 1175
2.008 0 tick 179576 1834
2.008 1 tick 202022 12046
3.008 0 tick 93262 384
3.008 1 tick 63649 1118
3.008 2 total 651077 18204
x86
Example 2: Measuring Branch Prediction Success on Pentium 4
The following example measures branch mispredictions and total branch
instructions in user and system mode on a Pentium 4 machine.
example% cpustat-c \
pic12=branch_retired,emask12=0x4,pic14=branch_retired,\
emask14=0xf,sys 1 3
time cpu event pic12 pic14
1.010 1 tick 458 684
1.010 0 tick 305 511
2.010 0 tick 181 269
2.010 1 tick 469 684
3.010 0 tick 182 269
3.010 1 tick 468 684
3.010 2 total 2063 3101
Example 3: Counting Memory Accesses on Opteron
The following example determines the number of memory accesses made
through each memory controller on an Opteron, broken down by internal
memory latency:
cpustat-c \
pic0=NB_mem_ctrlr_page_access,umask0=0x01, \
pic1=NB_mem_ctrlr_page_access,umask1=0x02, \
pic2=NB_mem_ctrlr_page_access,umask2=0x04,sys \
1
time cpu event pic0 pic1 pic2
1.003 0 tick 41976 53519 7720
1.003 1 tick 5589 19402 731
2.003 1 tick 6011 17005 658
2.003 0 tick 43944 45473 7338
3.003 1 tick 7105 20177 762
3.003 0 tick 47045 48025 7119
4.003 0 tick 43224 46296 6694
4.003 1 tick 5366 19114 652
WARNINGS
By running the cpustat command, the super-user forcibly invalidates all
existing performance counter context. This can in turn cause all invo‐
cations of the cputrack command, and other users of performance counter
context, to exit prematurely with unspecified errors.
If cpustat is invoked on a system that has CPU performance counters
which are not supported by Solaris, the following message appears:
cpustat: cannot access performance counters - Operation not applicable
This error message implies that cpc_open() has failed and is documented
in cpc_open(3CPC). Review this documentation for more information about
the problem and possible solutions.
If a short interval is requested, cpustat might not be able to keep up
with the desired sample rate. In this case, some samples might be
dropped.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ ATTRIBUTE TYPE │ ATTRIBUTE VALUE │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Availability │SUNWcpcu │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Interface Stability │Evolving │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
SEE ALSOcputrack(1), nawk(1), perl(1), iostat(1M), prstat(1M), psrset(1M),
vmstat(1M), cpc(3CPC), cpc_open(3CPC), cpc_bind_cpu(3CPC), geth‐
rtime(3C), strtoll(3C), libcpc(3LIB), attributes(5)NOTES
When cpustat is run on a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading enabled, a CPC
set is bound to only one logical CPU of each physical CPU. See
cpc_bind_cpu(3CPC).
SunOS 5.10 18 Jul 2005 cpustat(1M)
