Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Linux Performance issues - How/where to start with?


Let's talk on "how to troubleshoot or analyze performance issues in Linux". There are many a times that we find a server performing slow (specifically a Linux system ) compared to previous days or sluggish or in a worst case system responds slow i.e running a simple command such as “ls” would take more time to respond. So, at that juncture a system admin or person in charge of system would be in a dilemma on what is causing such slowness, is that the processor (CPU overloaded), or memory (high memory usage) or network (slower network channels) or disk (poor performance of disk drives) or a bug with an application or kernel. No amount of tuning would help if a hardware component is broken. Identifying bottlenecks at this point of time would need a proper analysis of system sub-components. Therefore, I came up with this page which documents simple steps/instructions/navigation which can be used to identify culprit for system slowness and later more advanced steps/commands could be used to dig further (only a few most followed commands and steps are documented here i.e native).