Basic tools for Solaris Performance monitoring

One of the development teams I was consulting for was facing some performance problems on the Solaris platform. The Websphere JVM was hanging and the performance of the application dropped.

The three basic tools on the Solaris platform that are invaluable at this time are:
1. vmstat - gives CPU stats, memory utilization
2. iostat - Gives I/O stats
3. netstat - gives network stats.

This link gives good info on understanding the thump rules to apply to analyze the output of these commands.

Another command that is very powerful on solaris is the 'prstat' command. prstat is more versatile than 'top' that is present on most unix systems.

To find out the top 5 processes consuming CPU time:
prstat -s cpu -a -n 5

To find out the top 5 processes consuming most memory:
prstat -s size -n 5

To dump the CPU usage of a process every 15 secs to a file
prstat -p 2443 15 > server.out &

A very nice feature of prstat is that by using the -L switch, prstat will report statistics for each thread of a process.
prstat -L -p 3295

The following links also provide good info about some basic troubleshooting tips:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/prstat.html
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg21162381
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21052644

Disk usage commands on Solaris

du and df are the most powerful commands on Solaris to find out the disk usage.
Here is a list of the most useful commands at a glance.
- df -h (shows the file system partitions)
- du -ks /opt/* | sort -nr | head -5 (shows the top 5 dirs in /opt. Subdirs are summarized.)
- du -ak /opt/* | sort -nr | head -5 (shows the top 5 dirs/files in /opt including subdirs)

rm craziness

I was trying to delete some files on Solaris using the rm command.
The file names were something like: "-HqFbc3YQ0wQYhH7u16veP7_BBC_6_090540.xml"
These files were generated by a program using random numbers.

Now no matter what I tried, rm always returned with an error for files starting with a - (minus sign)
I found the solution here.

Snippet:
To remove a file whose name begins with a dash ( - ) character, refer to the file with the following syntax:
rm ./-filename
Using the redundant ./ directory information prevents the dash from occurring at the beginning of the filename, and being interpreted as an option of the rm command.

Finding the version of Solaris

Commands to find out the version of Solaris the box is running on:

uname -X
more /etc/release

Solaris tips - find out RAM and HD size

A few quick commands to help developers new on Solaris 10:

To find out the amount of RAM on the system.
> prtconf / grep Mem

To find out the Hard Disk capacity
> iostat -E / grep Size

To find out the file-system size
>df -h

To find out the CPU usage
> mpstat 12 5
> ps -e -o pcpu -o pid -o user -o args
> top

The following links give more info on common commands:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-find-out-linux-cpu-utilization.html
http://www.geocities.com/arndike/Solaris_probe_process.html
http://projects.ericshalov.com/technotes/notes/solaris