The pidstat application has several options for generating different reports:

• -d: This reports IO statistics
• -r: This reports page faults and memory utilization
• -u: This reports CPU utilization
• -w: This reports task switches

Report Context Switch activity:

    $ pidstat -w | head -5
    Linux 2.6.32-642.11.1.el6.x86_64 (rtdaserver.cflynt.com)    
    02/15/2017  _x86_64_ (12 CPU)

    11:18:35 AM       PID   cswch/s nvcswch/s  Command
    11:18:35 AM         1      0.00      0.00  init
    11:18:35 AM         2      0.00      0.00  kthreadd

The pidstat application sorts its report by the PID number. The data can be re-organized with the sort utility. The following command displays the five applications that generate the most context switches per second (Field 4 in the -w output):

    $ pidstat -w | sort -nr -k 4 | head -5
    11:13:55 AM     13054    351.49      9.12  vmware-vmx
    11:13:55 AM      5763     37.57      1.10  vmware-vmx
    11:13:55 AM      3157     27.79      0.00  kondemand/0
    11:13:55 AM      3167     21.18      0.00  kondemand/10
    11:13:55 AM      3158     21.17      0.00  kondemand/1