Monitoring page faults (page out)

Page-outs can be a sign of trouble. When the kernel detects that memory is running low, it attempts to free up memory by paging out. Though this may happen briefly from time to time, if page-outs are plentiful and constant, the kernel can reach a point where it's actually spending more time managing paging activity than running the applications, and system performance suffers. To monitor page-outs in the system, we can use vmstat. Below script display the amount of free memory for page-out. Ideally it should be zero.

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/vmstat | head -3 | tail -n +3 | awk {'print $8'}

[root@fc21 ~]# pageout
0