vmstat

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vmstat
[[Programmer|DeveloperTemplate:Pluralize from text]]AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial releaseFebruary 1985; 41 years ago (1985-02)
Template:Infobox software/simple
Operating systemUnix and Unix-like
TypeCommand
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vmstat (virtual memory statistics) is a computer system monitoring tool that collects and displays summary information about operating system memory, processes, interrupts, paging and block I/O. Users of vmstat can specify a sampling interval which permits observing system activity in near-real time.[1]

The vmstat tool is available on most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Linux or Solaris.

Syntax

The syntax and output of vmstat often differs slightly between different operating systems.

# vmstat 2 6
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 0  0   2536  21496 185684 1353000    0    0     0    14    1     2  0  0 100  0
 0  0   2536  21496 185684 1353000    0    0     0    28 1030   145  0  0 100  0
 0  0   2536  21496 185684 1353000    0    0     0     0 1026   132  0  0 100  0
 0  0   2536  21520 185684 1353000    0    0     0     0 1033   186  1  0 99  0
 0  0   2536  21520 185684 1353000    0    0     0     0 1024   141  0  0 100  0
 0  0   2536  21584 185684 1353000    0    0     0     0 1025   131  0  0 100  0

In the above example the tool reports every two seconds for six iterations.

We can get the customized or required outputs by using various options with the vmstat command.

# vmstat –s
This option is used to get memory statistics.
# vmstat –d
This option is used to get disk statistics.

See also

  • nmon — a system monitor tool for the AIX and Linux operating systems.
  • iostat
  • top
  • sar

References

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  1. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Chatterjee, Pooja; Mukherjee, Rohit; Das, Ishita; Roy, Tanmay (2021). Real-time performance benchmarking using vmstat/iostat (Report). Retrieved 2026-03-22.

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