Monitor memory usage with vmstat

Monitor memory usage with vmstat

vmstat does the similar job, except it works with the virtual memory statistics. For Windows users, please note the term virtual does not refer to the pagefile, i.e. swap. It refers to the logical abstraction of memory in kernel, which is then translated into physical addresses.

vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and CPU activity. Again, it is very handy for detecting problems with system performance.

Here’s a sample run of vmstat:

vmstat -x 10 10

The utility runs 10 times, reporting every 1 second. For example, we can see that out system has taken some swap, but it’s not doing anything much with it, there’s approx. 35MB free memory and there’s very little I/O activity, as there are no blocked processes. The CPU utilization spikes from just a few percents to almost 90% before calming down.

Nothing specially exciting, but in critical situations, this kind of information can be critical.