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mpstat

Overview​

mpstat reports processor-related statistics, showing CPU utilization for each processor.

Basic Usage​

# Display all processor statistics
mpstat -P ALL

# Show statistics with interval
mpstat 1 5

# Display global CPU statistics
mpstat

# Show specific CPU
mpstat -P 0

Output Fields​

  • CPU: Processor number
  • %usr: Percentage of CPU utilization at the user level
  • %nice: Percentage of CPU utilization at the user level with nice priority
  • %sys: Percentage of CPU utilization at the system level
  • %iowait: Percentage of time CPU is idle waiting for I/O operations
  • %irq: Percentage of time CPU is servicing hardware interrupts
  • %soft: Percentage of time CPU is servicing software interrupts
  • %steal: Percentage of time spent in involuntary wait by virtual CPU
  • %guest: Percentage of time spent running a virtual processor
  • %idle: Percentage of time CPU is idle

Examples​

# Monitor CPU usage every second for 10 iterations
mpstat 1 10

# Check for CPU saturation
mpstat 1 5 | grep -E "CPU|all"

# Monitor individual CPUs
mpstat -P ALL 2 3

# Check if CPUs are idle
mpstat -P ALL | awk '$NF < 20 {print "CPU" $2 " has low idle: " $NF "%"}'

Performance Analysis​

  • High %iowait: I/O bottleneck affecting CPU performance
  • High %sys: System-level overhead (kernel processes)
  • Low %idle: CPU is heavily utilized
  • High %usr: User applications consuming CPU

CPU Saturation Indicators​

  • %idle < 20% indicates CPU saturation
  • %iowait > 20% indicates I/O wait issues
  • %usr + %sys > 80% indicates high CPU usage
  • iostat - I/O statistics
  • vmstat - Virtual memory statistics
  • top - Dynamic process viewer
  • sar - System activity reporter
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