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System running slow?
If so, your system will be either Memory, CPU, or I/O bound.
Memory, Compute (CPU), or I/O Bound?
This can sometimes be due to software, but often, it’s the hardware that’s the culprit.
Think about it like pipes with water running through them.
For I/O, reading from slow hard drives as well as excessive disk writes can be the issue.
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All you need ishtopandiotop, two semi-graphical tools, which can be easily installed on Linux.
Then look at the colorful CPU bars at the top of the screen.
If your processor has 16 threads, there will be 16 bars.
Simply look at the memory (Mem) and swap (Swp) bars mentioned earlier.
Once a system starts and continues swapping, it will become prohibitively slow.
It is easy to see when you start running out of memory, as the bar will become full.
However, the swap space usage can sometimes be a little ambiguous.
For example, 20% may be in use, but there is plenty of memory left.
As plenty of memory remains free, this situation is fine and not a cause of any concern.
There is also an exception to a memory bar that looks quite full, and that is caching.
Your system may be set up to reserve x amount of memory for caching.
The used/free memory and swap bars look fine too.
Let’s checkout iotop next.
To do so, it’s crucial that you use
to startiotopas iotop requires sudo.
A few examples:
Is the systemDisk/IO bound?
Is the systemMemory/Swap bound?
Is the systemCPU bound?
Use the bottom process list in htop to find the process which is hogging the CPU.
you’ve got the option to even terminate it directly from within htop by using the F9 key.
If the issue is the CPU itself (i.e.
It may be time to upgrade the system overall.
More Than One Performance Bottleneck?
Both will need to be fixed before the system will become performant again.
