Running vmstat slows performance of the unix server?

Question

Does vmstat degrades performance of the unix server?

Answer 1

Clearly, it takes some resources to run vmstat. However, the amount of resources it needs is tiny, so the performance impact will be negligible (probably not even measurable).

If we take Linux as an example, all vmstat does is read a couple of small pseudo-files in /proc, format their contents and print out the result.