Understanding System Statistics

Measuring the hardware utilization of each device is the key to evaluate the efficiency of networking infrastructure. The performance of a device is determined primarily by two hardware resources: CPU and main memory. System statistics in Netvisor ONE comprise the CPU and memory usage of the switch.

System statistics on a switch also include memory swapping and paging parameters. Swapping is when an entire process' address space is mapped from the main memory (RAM) to a secondary memory (disk memory) that is used to "swap" pages to or from in order to free up space for the relevant processes in main memory. Paging allows a granular method of copying where, instead of an entire process, frames or pages of a process are copied to and from the main memory. The paging and memory swap parameters are important indicators of performance as consistently high values in these fields are predictors of slowness of the switch.