[SLL] is my slowdown due to hardware?

[Rob Sherwood]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:41 AM, William Kreuter <billyk at drizzle.com> wrote:
> How in general does one go about ruling out that it
> could be any factor other than creaky hardware?  And
> what would be the hardware problem?  Drives spinning
> too slowly?  CPU not clocking right?  Grubby RAM?  My
> knowledge of hardware and o/s arcana is minimal.

fwiw, the place I would start is `vmstat`

If you run `vmstat 5` or some such, you will get system information
aggregated over 5 seconds, every 5 seconds:

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
-----cpu------
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 0  0    104  59856  26584 1404228    0    0    33   101    1    1  3
2 94  2  0
 0  0    104  59856  26596 1404232    0    0     0    63 1056   65  0
0 100  0  0
 0  0    104  59856  26604 1404232    0    0     0     9 1055   69  0
0 99  1  0


Every collumn (and it will take a while with the manpage to figure out
what they mean) is a potential bottleneck.  I would run vmstat, find
the collumn with the highest number, and start there.

Good luck,

- Rob
.