[SOLVED] Does sar put a significant load on system resources

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warron.french
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[SOLVED] Does sar put a significant load on system resources

Post by warron.french » 2018/08/31 20:37:04

We have a Satellite 6.1.9 server (yes, I know it's old and perhaps even unsupported officially), running on Red Hat 7.2 Server.

The server is a VM running in VMware ESXi (don't know the revision).
Don't know the real/physical hardware details.

The current system has 6 cores and 16GB of RAM; and it cannot keep up with the demand. I have seen all 6 cores taken up to 97.1% or more across the system consistently for more than 30 minutes. I have seen load averages as high as 1916 (for a virtual system with 6 vCPU).

Anyway, at some point in the future, we intend to build a brand new separate Satellite 6.3.x (virtual) server; with tons of RAM and CPUs.

I would like to suggest to my cohort that we install the sar tools; however, we don't know what the load on the system will look like. Is it as taxing as auditd can be? Or is it pretty lightweight? Is it nominally worse than the top command?

Any feedback about sar would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Last edited by warron.french on 2018/09/26 01:52:15, edited 1 time in total.
Thanks,
War

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TrevorH
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Re: Does sar put a significant load on system resources

Post by TrevorH » 2018/08/31 20:49:07

It should have minimal impact I think. It runs every 10 mins to gather a snapshot of the stats. I suspect it runs for less than 1s at a time.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
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warron.french
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Re: Does sar put a significant load on system resources

Post by warron.french » 2018/09/19 22:57:13

TrevorH, do I need to add it myself to the root crontab? I checked the /etc/crontab file, didn't see it.

However, I did see in /etc/cron.d/ the script sysstat. In there, I didn't see the sar command; or is it not spelled with an "r"?
Thanks,
War

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TrevorH
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Re: Does sar put a significant load on system resources

Post by TrevorH » 2018/09/20 02:02:36

The reporting tool is called sar and is run when you want a report, the collectors are called sa1 and sa2 and are triggered from cron.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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warron.french
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Joined: 2014/03/27 20:21:58

Re: Does sar put a significant load on system resources

Post by warron.french » 2018/09/20 20:09:55

TrevorH wrote:
2018/09/20 02:02:36
The reporting tool is called sar and is run when you want a report, the collectors are called sa1 and sa2 and are triggered from cron.
Thanks TrevorH.
Thanks,
War

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