SUMMARY: Solaris CPU load from Perl

Original question:

> I'd like to be able to determine the CPU's busy/idle states through
> Perl, much like the readout of top.  A few attempts have so far proven
> fruitless:
>
> - vmstat - this is fine on machines that haven't been up for long, but
> there is a problem after a few months that causes negative numbers to
> appear for some of the values.  i can't rely on this. (
> http://www.sunmanagers.org/archives/2000/1277.html )
>
> - Solaris:: packages. The script needs to be portable so I don't want
> to have to install packages everywhere.

Thanks to all those who replied.  Suggestions were:

- Kstat Perl module 
(http://search.cpan.org/search?module=Solaris::Kstat).  Although I think 
this would be the best solution in most ways, I was put off by the 
trouble I had building it.  I need something portable and easy to 
install. (Kevin Buterbaugh suggested that building it with the same 
compiler I built Perl with would probably help).

- sar. this would be good but doesn't seem to be installed on all the 
machines we have (?).

- vmstat. Jonas Blaberg suggested running vmstat for a few lines and 
taking the second or third values thus skipping the first problematic 
one. this would work, but is slow. i would have to wait 3+ seconds for 
each reading. (shame there is no way to reset the counters).

- mpstat. this gives CPU states for all CPUs in the machine which is 
nice. an average could easily be calculated.

- uptime. Although uptime doesn't give me the CPU load the same way as 
top, a measure of jobs in the run queue is a good an indication of load.

I think after all that I'll use a combination of mpstat and uptime.

Thanks again.

Alex...

--
-= alex dyas - webmaster - twowaytv - uk =-