“Hello, True Believers, and welcome back to the Corner; the
SysAdmin’s Corner, that is. Sit down and get comfortable as we
continue to explore the pokes, prods and tweaks that affect old
Tux’s performance and, in some cases, simply how he does things.
Many different factors affect performance. Changing one thing may
or may not translate into a noticeable performance improvement.
Sometimes, it’s a question of a little tweaking here and a little
tweaking there. Deciding what to change can be quite challenging.
It also helps to be able to determine where the bottlenecks
are.”
“Last time around, we looked at the uptime command (among other
things) and what it tells you about what your system is doing right
now. In particular, uptime tracks the load average, or number of
processes waiting to be dealt with….”
“For a more comprehensive peek into what you system is
doing, try the top command. The first thing you’ll notice is that
the load average numbers from the uptime command are also part of
the top display. Running top delivers far more information
than the uptime command does by itself, including the actual number
of processes, distribution of work done between system and user
processes, memory utilization, and much more.”