Concept of "Performance Counters" in Linux/Unix

Question

Windows has a Performance Counters infrastructure. The OS provides some common counters, and I can go add my own. What is the corresponding concept in Linux/Unix?

Answer 1

Take a look at:

• OProfile
• perfctr
• perfmon2

Answer 2

There is also PAPI and PerfSuite.

Answer 3

Several applications exist which periodically check system performance.

• iostat, vmstat, and netstat - Run these commands once to get a snapshot of activity.
• sysstat - This runs periodically and maintains a history of statistics such as the above.
• Munin - As sysstat, but with pretty web graphs.