>> and certainly anyone who's been around a computer more than a week or
>> two knows which direction "in" and "out" are customarily seen from.
>>
>> regards, tom lane
>>
>
Apparently not whoever wrote the man page that everyone copied ;-)
> Interesting. I checked this on several machines. They actually say
> different things.
>
> Redhat 9- bi: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).
> Latest Cygwin- bi: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).
> Redhat 7.x- bi: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).
> Redhat AS3- bi: blocks sent out to a block device (in blocks/s)
>
> I would say that I probably agree, things should be relative to the
> cpu. However, it doesn't seem to be something that was universally
> agreed upon. Or maybe the man-pages were all wrong, and only got
> updated recently.
>
Looks like the man pages are wrong, for RH7.3 at least. It says bi is
'blocks written', but an actual test like 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test
bs=1024 count=16384' on an otherwise nearly idle RH7.3 box gives:
procs memory swap io
system cpu
r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us
sy id
0 0 0 75936 474704 230452 953580 0 0 0 0 106 2527 0
0 99
0 0 0 75936 474704 230452 953580 0 0 0 16512 376 2572
0 2 98
0 0 0 75936 474704 230452 953580 0 0 0 0 105 2537
0 0 100
Which is in line with bo being 'blocks written'.
M
