SPEED NEED, MORE SPEED SCOTTY

[Jeff Hagstrom]

In the last week or so the machine seems to have come to a crawl. We have a K9000 with 2 processors and 4 gig of memory running unix 11. Are there any diagnostics that could be run that show me what the slowness is caused from?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Jeff,

If you have Glance, that would be my weapon of choice. If not try sar and top. You should also do a swapinfo and vmstat to check on swapping. All of this could be caused by 1 or 2 runaway processes. Man sar,swapinfo,vmstat for details.

Clay

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Jeff:

I agree with Clay. If you have Glance, use it. If you don't, you can load a trial copy from the Application CD. In this case, I think you will find it's worth its purchase price.

...JRF...

[Satish Y]

Hi Jeff,

The slowness may be because of heavy load. There are several reasons for it, one is runaway processes. These consume high CPU resources. You can identify them by tty column. These are user processes which are not associated with terminal, u see a "?" sign in TTY colums of "ps -ef " ouput.(for ex. pine, -sh, elm, etc.)
Be careful while selecting processes, because daemons and jobs fired by cron also contains "?" sign in tty column(they are not associate with terminal)

Other reason may be any process, that is forking lot of child processes which are not ending.

Cheers...
Satish.

[John Bolene]

It could also be due to a lot of network traffic. Someone may be doing a network ping such as ping 192. or may have several sessions doing this.

Massive data being transfered thru FTP's or backing up the machine over the network can also cause this.

As has been said, Glance, GlancePlus, or top can be used to at least get a clue what is going on.

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Jeff

The basic way to start is to do sar 2 10 and find out what is using the system resources , is it i/o , sys or user time. Then you can further go to the diagnostics , possible reasons can vary from heavy I/O on disks ( unbalanced Disks ) to Open ended SCSI Bus to memory utilization , to proceess table full , some times you may like to boot the system to clear logs , buffers and would speed up the system.

Manoj Srivastava

[Deshpande Prashant]

Hi Jeff
The machine can slow down because of high load, runaway processes, hardware errors, network load.
Taking look at dmesg oupput and syslog file will revel any errors reported by OS.
uptime or w command will give average system load and no. of users. With sar, top and glance you can drill down to find any particular process, hogging resources.
swapinfo and vmstat will help you identifying if memory is in crunch.

All the best.
Prashant Deshpande.