sysdiagnose(1) BSD General Commands Manual sysdiagnose(1)NAMEsysdiagnose — gathers system-wide diagnostic information helpful in
investigating system performance issues.
SYNOPSISsysdiagnose-h
sysdiagnose [-f results_directory] [-t] [-q] [-b] [process_name | pid]
DESCRIPTIONsysdiagnose tool gathers system diagnostic information helpful in inves‐
tigating system performance issues. A great deal of information is har‐
vested, spanning system state and configuration. sysdiagnose needs to be
run as root. sysdiagnose can be triggered upon pressing a special key
chord; this is currently Control-Option-Command-Shift-Period.
What sysdiagnose Collects:
· A spindump of the system
· Several seconds of fs_usage ouput
· Several seconds of top output
· Data about kernel zones
· Status of loaded kernel extensions
· Resident memory usage of user processes
· All system logs, kernel logs, opendirectory log, windowserver
log, and log of power management events
· A System Profiler report
· All spin and crash reports
· Disk usage information
· I/O Kit registry information
· Network status
· If a specific process is supplied as an argument: list of mal‐
loc-allocated buffers in the process's heap is collected
· If a specific process is supplied as an argument: data about
unreferenced malloc buffers in the process's memory is col‐
lected
· If a specific process is supplied as an argument: data about
the virtual memory regions allocated in the process
OPTIONS-h Print full usage.
-f results_directory
Specify the directory where the results will be stored. The
default results directory is /var/tmp.
-q Skips calling footprint.
-t Enable "Thorough Mode". See below.
-b Do not show the resulting archive in a Finder window upon com‐
pletion.
process_name | pid
If a single process appears to be slowing down the system, pass‐
ing in the process name or ID as the argument gathers additional
process-specific diagnostic data.
THOROUGH MODEsysdiagnose can be run in a "Thorough Mode" in which standard data is
gathered as well as a kernel trace. Enabling "Thorough Mode" for the com‐
mand-line sysdiagnose and key-chord sysdiagnose are independent and are
performed as follows:
For "Thorough Mode" in the command-line sysdiagnose use the "-t" flag.
To enable "Thorough Mode" for special key-chord launches of sysdiagnose
execute "touch /var/tmp/.thoroughsysdiagnose"
To disable "Thorough Mode" for special key-chord launches of sysdiagnose
execute "rm /var/tmp/.thoroughsysdiagnose"
Note:
Gathering the kernel trace can increase the size of sysdiagnose output by
hundreds of MB as well as increase the time for sysdiagnose to complete.
EXIT STATUSsysdiagnose exits with status 0 if there were no internal errors encoun‐
tered during the diagnostic, or >0 when an error unrelated to external
state occurs or unusable input is provided by the user.
Darwin April 27, 2024 Darwin
