Unix Performance Counters

Applies to TestComplete 15.63, last modified on April 23, 2024

TestComplete can monitor various characteristics of Unix performance counters during the test execution (see Monitoring Tested Application Performance - Basic Concepts).

UNIX-based operating systems can publish their resource usage through the Rstat (remote statistics) interface. The performance statistics is retrieved from the kernel by the rstatd background process (daemon according to the UNIX terminology). Therefore, to obtain the real-time status of the resource usage of hardware, any client application can make a query to this daemon via the Rstat interface. The table below describes counters provided that way.

In order for TestComplete to be able to use the counters, the monitored computer should be preconfigured in special way. See Enabling Performance Monitoring for detailed information.

The rstat provides you with the following counters:

Counter Description
Percentage User CPU Time The percentage of the CPU time taken up executing user commands. This counter shows the CPU usage per user across all the processors globally.
Percentage Nice CPU Time The percentage of the CPU time for all processors globally taken up by low-priority processes. The time taken up by "nice" tasks is already taken into account in the Percentage System CPU Time and Percentage User CPU Time counters.
Percentage System CPU Time The percentage of the CPU time for all processors globally taken up executing system tasks, including system calls to kernel routines.
Percentage Idle CPU Time The percentage of the CPU time the processor was idle. This counter shows the CPU idleness across all the processors globally.
Rate of Disk Transfers The number of disk transfers per second.
Memory Pages Paged In The number of pages moved from the disk into the cache memory.
Memory Pages Paged Out The number of pages moved from the cache memory to the disk.
Memory Pages Swapped In The number of pages moved from swap space to storage space.
Memory Pages Swapped Out The number of pages moved from storage space to swap space.
Interrupt count The number of interruptions per second.
Context switch count The number of processor context changes per second.
System Load Average (1 minute) The average number of active system tasks within the last minute.
System Load Average (5 minutes) The average number of active system tasks within the last 5 minutes.
System Load Average (15 minutes) The average number of active system tasks within the last 15 minutes.
Network In Packets Count The number of network packets entering per second.
Network Out Packets Count The number of network packets exiting per second.
Network In Errors Count The total number of inbound network errors per second.
Network Out Errors Count The total number of outbound network errors per second.
Network Collisions Count The number of network collisions occurring within the monitoring interval.

A collision is an undesirable event resulting from competing network packets being transmitted over the same channel.

See Also

Monitoring Tested Application Performance - Basic Concepts
Enabling Performance Monitoring
Adding Performance Counters
Counter Reference

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