Here are four Linux commands to view page fault statistics:
vmstat– This is a versatile command that provides information on system resource utilization, including page faults. Thevmstatcommand reports the number of page faults in the “faults” column.
vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
1 0 0 356428 76048 573456 0 0 3 55 2 4 1 0 99 0 0
In this example, the si and so columns indicate the number of pages swapped in and out, respectively. The “faults” value is the sum of si and so.
/proc/meminfo– This is a special file in the/procfile system that contains information about the system’s memory usage. You can use thegrepcommand to display the page fault statistics:
grep -E '^(Page.*Faults)' /proc/meminfo
Page Faults: 9907
In this example, the “Page Faults” value indicates the number of page faults that have occurred.
sar– This command provides system utilization information and can be used to display page fault statistics. To view page fault statistics withsar, you need to install thesysstatpackage.
sar -B
Linux 4.18.0-193.19.1.el8_2.x86_64 (server) 08/02/2023 _x86_64_ (4 CPU)
05:34:01 PM pgpgin/s pgpgout/s fault/s majflt/s pgfree/s pgscank/s pgscand/s pgsteal/s %vmeff
05:34:02 PM 0.00 45.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
05:34:03 PM 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
05:34:04 PM 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average: 0.00 22.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
In this example, the “fault/s” column indicates the number of page faults per second.
mpstat– This command provides information on processor and system activity, including page fault statistics.
mpstat
Linux 4.18.0-193.19.1.el8_2.x86_64 (server) 08/02/2023 _x86_64_ (4 CPU)
05:38:01 PM CPU %usr %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %guest %gnice %idle
05:38:02 PM