[ Thanks to Rudd-O for
this link. ]
“Diagnosing server (and desktop, and network) load issues is
always tricky. When an application misbehaves for short bursts of
time, it’s often a matter of guesswork to find out which.“The regular monitoring application suite is just not enough.
top only analyzes CPU usage. vmstat and iostat only present
summaries, but can’t find culprits. strace is too low-level and
doesn’t allow to visualize proportions of disk accesses among
processes. But pinpointing the exact application or daemon that’s
taxing computer resources, whether it’s for short or long times,
that’s currently impossible…”