[CentOS] The iostat command

Thu Jan 3 09:33:34 UTC 2008
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Indunil Jayasooriya wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am learning iostat command to understand disk I/O statistics.
>
> We have 2 Centos 4 servers running where oracle is installed.We
> installed them 2 weeks ago. @ that time, These Servers performed well.
> But, Now We have come to know that these 2 Machines are quite slow
> when comparing to the first week.
>
> So, Some say, run iostat to see statictics. I am not familiar with comamnd well.
>
>  I found below url
>
> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/admin-guide/s1-resource-rhlspec.html
>
>   

as the page says, `man iostat` for more information

i typically run something like

# iostat -x 5

and ignore the first sample.. every 5 seconds this will output 
information on disk IO by drive volume.   I find the await a 
particularly important, as its the amount of time disk IO operations are 
staying queued waiting for the drive, if this gets up tnio the 1000mS 
range you have a serious bottleneck

you said Oracle.    to manage and maintain a production Oracle database 
server, you need an experienced Oracle Data Base Administrator ("DBA") 
who can optimize and tune and maintain the database.   such a person 
will be very familiar with tracking query and tablespace IO statistics, 
identifying bottlenecks and restructuring things to achieve optimal 
performance