Brandt Eppler wrote:

> On a multi processor system is there a difference between
>
> Sar 5 5 and mpsar 5 5 ?
>
> Which is the best one to run for a SMP machine?

They are effectively equivalent for most purposes. `mpsar` supports a
few added flags, but if you aren't using those, its output is identical.
Also, `mpsar -A` includes the output of those added flags.

`mpsar` was initially a separate binary, added when you installed SCO
MPX (SMP) on top of the corresponding release of SCO Unix. It was
separate at that time because it was a special MPX add-on, built from
different sources than the standard `sar`. The sources weren't merged
until later. Now both are built from one set of sources, but since the
documentation and behavior were already set, the `mpsar` name hasn't
been removed.

The differences should probably have been smoothed over by making `sar`
recognize the few added `mpsar` options when running on an SMP kernel;
but that hasn't been done.

Any OSR5 `sar` binary will act differently when invoked under any of 4
names: sar, mpsar, cpusar, scosar. (`scosar` isn't documented and no
link to that name is shipped. It adds tracking of a few obscure
filesystem behaviors; and some flags to get different sorts of delta
outputs. It's undocumented for fairly good reasons -- the flags don't
work very well.)

`cpusar` offers per-CPU tracking of some behaviors. It's a lot more
different than `mpsar` (but still the same binary, these days).

>Bela<