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osr5 sar mpsar cpusar scosar

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From: Bela Lubkin <filbo@armory.com>
Subject: Re: sar & mpsar
Date: 24 Jul 2005 07:52:42 -0400
Message-ID: <200507240452.aa04842@deepthought.armory.com> 
References: <mailman.5.1122171817.24416.sco-misc@lists.celestial.com> 

Brandt Eppler wrote:

> On a multi processor system is there a difference between
> 
> Sar 5 5  and   mpsar 5 5  ?
> 
> Which is the best one to run for a SMP machine?

They are effectively equivalent for most purposes.  `mpsar` supports a
few added flags, but if you aren't using those, its output is identical.
Also, `mpsar -A` includes the output of those added flags.

`mpsar` was initially a separate binary, added when you installed SCO
MPX (SMP) on top of the corresponding release of SCO Unix.  It was
separate at that time because it was a special MPX add-on, built from
different sources than the standard `sar`.  The sources weren't merged
until later.  Now both are built from one set of sources, but since the
documentation and behavior were already set, the `mpsar` name hasn't
been removed.

The differences should probably have been smoothed over by making `sar`
recognize the few added `mpsar` options when running on an SMP kernel;
but that hasn't been done.

Any OSR5 `sar` binary will act differently when invoked under any of 4
names: sar, mpsar, cpusar, scosar.  (`scosar` isn't documented and no
link to that name is shipped.  It adds tracking of a few obscure
filesystem behaviors; and some flags to get different sorts of delta
outputs.  It's undocumented for fairly good reasons -- the flags don't
work very well.)

`cpusar` offers per-CPU tracking of some behaviors.  It's a lot more
different than `mpsar` (but still the same binary, these days).

>Bela<
 

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