ultrix1.2 accounting - sa vs. vmstat

[Sid Shapiro]

(Please pardon this - I posted this a couple of weeks ago, but got no
responses at all - I can't believe that no one has anything to say on
this, so I presume it never got very far.)

Hi folks,
	I am trying (still) to do some accounting on an ultrix 1.2 vax 785.
	I have written several scripts to do some plotting of results of
	sa.  One thing I look a lot at is idle time.  According to sa, idle
	time on this machine is generally over 30%.  Idle doesn't come
	directly out of sa, but if I know that an accounting file is only
	active between certain hours and if I subtract from that time the
	total cpu+system I figured that would give me idle.  That seems
	right, except that idle is, as I said, over 30% during the day.
	That didn't feel right, so I ran vmstat over the same period, every
	60 seconds and collected the data.  Gee - vmstat showed 0 idle over
	the same time.  An inconsistancy.  Can anyone explaion this?
Thanks, folks.
-- 
Sid Shapiro -- Wang Institute of Graduate Studies
	ss at wanginst.EDU		(ss%wanginst.CSNET at Csnet-Relay.ARPA)
	(617)649-9731		decvax!wanginst!ss