Oracle Display Number of CPUs Oracle UNIX/Linux Tips by Burleson Consulting

Displaying the number of CPU processors in UNIX

You need to have special command for each dialect of UNIX to display CPU information.  Knowing the number of CPUs is very important to the Oracle DBA because it shows the number of parallel query processes that can be concurrently executing on the UNIX server.  Table 2-2 shows the common commands for each major dialect.

UNIX Dialect	Command to display the number of CPUs
Linux	cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep processor|wc -l
Solaris	psrinfo -v|grep "Status of processor"|wc -l
AIX	lsdev -C|grep Process|wc -l
HP/UX	ioscan -C processor | grep processor | wc -l

Table 2: UNIX command to display the number of CPUs

Now let's take a close look at the commands for each dialect.

Display the number of CPUs in HP/UX

In HP/UX the ioscan command is used to display the number of processors.

root> ioscan -C processor | grep processor | wc -l
16

Display number of CPUs in Solaris

In Sun Solaris, the prsinfo command can be used to count the number of CPUs on the processor.

root> psrinfo -v|grep "Status of processor"|wc -l
       2

For details about the Solaris CPUs, the ?v (verbose) option can be used with the prsinfo command.

root> psrinfo -v

Status of processor 0 as of: 12/13/00 14:47:41
  Processor has been on-line since 11/05/00 13:26:42.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 450 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
Status of processor 2 as of: 12/13/00 14:47:41
  Processor has been on-line since 11/05/00 13:26:43.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 450 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.

Display number of CPUs in Linux

To see the number of CPUs on a Linux server, you can cat the /proc/cpuinfo file.  In the example below we see that our Linux server has 4 CPUs.

root> cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep processor|wc -l
      4

Display CPUs in AIX

The lsdev command can be used to see the number of CPUs on an IBM AIX server.  Below we see that this AIX server has four CPUs:

root> lsdev -C|grep Process|wc ?l
       4

Oracle Training from Don Burleson  The best on site "Oracle training classes" are just a phone call away! You can get personalized Oracle training by Donald Burleson, right at your shop!