[rescue] "svc.startd" question - 32% system utilization?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Bryan Gurney <arb_npx42 at comcast.net>
>Date: 2006/09/08 Fri PM 01:34:09 CDT
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] "svc.startd" question - 32% system utilization?

>On Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:38:56 -0400, Lionel Peterson  
><lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I have an Ultra 10 (440 MHz, 1024 Meg, IDE-based) acting as an install  
>> server (not Jumpstart, just serving up files for network installs), and  
>> while trying to get a Netra T1 setup, I noticed the "svc.startd" system  
>> process was consuming about 32% of the available system resources (as  
>> reported by 'top' - so apply a grain of salt to that number) - that  
>> seemed odd.
>
>Whenever I ran prstat or top on Solaris 9 or 10, the CPU usage percentage  
>figures seemed like a 1 minute average instead of a near-instantaneous  
>figure.  Can anybody confirm this somehow?  It sort of bugs me to see a  
>pegged process slowly crawl up in CPU usage when top on Linux would show  
>it as 99% instantaneously.

The difference would be the time slice involved (obviously) - If it really was "instantaneous" it would only indicate "top" or "prstat" and peg it at 100% ;^)

The thing I always heard from the performance engineers at $work-4 was that by imposing a load on the processor, top "pollutes" the results, and you need to consider that when reviewing results. 'vmstat' is similar, and imposes a much greater load on the CPU to reflect process start-up, you just give it a few intervals to let it "normalize".

Lionel