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From: Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass@teledomenet.gr>
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Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:43:47 +0300
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Cc: Matt Ruzicka <matt@frii.com>
Subject: Re: Tracking if disk is busy
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On Friday 23 June 2006 01:12, Matt Ruzicka wrote:
> We've got a couple servers that appear to have particularly busy disks and
> I was trying to determine if there is a way to more easily poll this data
> for tracking.
>
> I'm not sure if this is one of those can't see the forest for the trees
> issues or not, but the only means that I am familiar with to see the
> percentage of time the disk is busy is to run 'systat -vmstat'.  I was
> hoping for something more concise that I could run periodically and maybe
> even graph (realizing that watching this might well distort the results).
>
> It appears that iostat on Solaris gives this information, but I can't seem
> to mimic this functionality with FreeBSD.
>
> Are there other ways in FreeBSD to pull the percentage of time the disk is
> busy?
>

gstat gives percentage load per (device|slice|partition) which is what I think 
you need. but it's written for interactive use, it issues commands to the
terminal so you cannot have its output to file...