Mpstat is a computer command-line software used in unix-type operating systems to report (on the screen) processor related statistics.

The mpstat command writes to standard output activities for each avail- able processor, processor 0 being the first one. Global average activ- ities among all processors are also reported.

The mpstat command can be used both on SMP and UP machines, but in the latter, only global average activities will be printed. The interval parameter specifies the amount of time in seconds between each report. A value of 0 indicates that processors statistics are to be reported for the time since system startup (boot).

The count param- eter can be specified in conjunction with the interval parameter if this one is not set to zero. The value of count determines the number of reports generated at interval seconds apart. If the interval parame- ter is specified without the count parameter, the mpstat command gener- ates reports continuously.

REPORTS The report generated by the mpstat command has the following format: CPU Processor number. The keyword all indicates that statistics are calculated as averages among all processors.

%user Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while exe- cuting at the user level (application).

%nice Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while exe- cuting at the user level with nice priority.


%system Show the percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while exe- cuting at the system level (kernel). Note that this does not include the time spent servicing interrupts or softirqs.

%iowait Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle dur- ing which the system had an outstanding disk I/O request. %irq Show the percentage of time spent by the CPU or CPUs to service interrupts.

%soft Show the percentage of time spent by the CPU or CPUs to service softirqs. A softirq (software interrupt) is one of up to 32 enumerated software interrupts which can run on multiple CPUs at once.

%idle Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle and the system did not have an outstanding disk I/O request. intr/s Show the total number of interrupts received per second by the CPU or CPUs.

OPTIONS -P cpu | ALL Indicate the processor number for which statistics are to be reported. cpu is the processor number. Note that processor 0 is the first processor. The ALL keyword indicates that statistics are to be reported for all processors. -V Print version number and usage then exit. ENVIRONMENT The mpstat command takes into account the following environment vari- able: S_TIME_FORMAT If this variable exists and its value is ISO then the current locale will be ignored when printing the date in the report header. The mpstat command will use the ISO 8601 format (YYYY- MM-DD) instead. EXAMPLES mpstat 2 5 Display five reports of global statistics among all processors at two second intervals. mpstat -P ALL 2 5 Display five reports of statistics for all processors at two second intervals.

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