The following is a demonstration of the topsyscall command, Here topsyscall is run with no arguments, # topsyscall 2005 Jun 13 22:13:21, load average: 1.24, 1.24, 1.22 syscalls: 1287 SYSCALL COUNT getgid 4 getuid 5 waitsys 5 xstat 7 munmap 7 sysconfig 8 brk 8 setcontext 8 open 8 getpid 9 close 9 resolvepath 10 lwp_sigmask 22 mmap 26 lwp_park 43 read 59 write 72 sigaction 113 pollsys 294 ioctl 520 The screen updates every second, and continues until Ctrl-C is hit to end the program. In the above output we can see that the ioctl() system call occured 520 times, pollsys() 294 times and sigaction() 113 times. Here the command is run with a 10 second interval, # topsyscall 10 2005 Jun 13 22:15:35, load average: 1.21, 1.22, 1.22 syscalls: 10189 SYSCALL COUNT writev 6 close 7 lseek 7 open 7 brk 8 nanosleep 9 portfs 10 llseek 14 lwp_cond_wait 21 p_online 21 gtime 27 rusagesys 71 setcontext 92 lwp_sigmask 98 setitimer 183 lwp_park 375 write 438 read 551 pollsys 3071 ioctl 5144