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Date:      Thu, 28 Jan 1999 17:07:04 -0700 (MST)
From:      "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com>
To:        pantzer@ludd.luth.se (Mattias Pantzare)
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Device statistics
Message-ID:  <199901290007.RAA77048@panzer.plutotech.com>
In-Reply-To: <199901282019.VAA06412@zed.ludd.luth.se> from Mattias Pantzare at "Jan 28, 99 09:19:37 pm"

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Mattias Pantzare wrote...
> 
> > What's wrong with just looking at the busy_time value that the kernel keeps
> > track of?
> 
> That is only updated when busy_count is 0, it may never get uppdated if you put 
> a high load on the disks (that is realy easy to do...).
> 
> If you take samples every second and the disk get realy bussy 0.5 seconds 
> after the first sample you will miss half the time that the disk is in use. 0% 
> instead of the real value 50%.
> 
> You will find that this is the case realy fast if you try to use busy_time.
> 
> So, you have to look at busy_time, busy_coun, start_time and the sample time 
> to do anyting good of busy_time.

True enough.  Really, though, I'm not convinced that busy time is a very
useful measurement.  On any sufficiently busy disk, as you have pointed
out, there will almost always be transactions outstanding.

> > If you really want an accurate version of the current system uptime, you
> > should probably talk to Poul-Henning about it.  Providing the current
> > uptime is more of a generic service, and not something that would "fit"
> > into devstat..
> 
> Well, not realy. :-) The time that is interesting is when the sample is taken, 
> not when my program get a chance to get the current system uptime. But a 
> generic service may be good enough.

I think it would be better to have a generic service, if that is what you
need.  Who knows, there may already be some facility to do it that I don't
know about. :)

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken@plutotech.com

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