sluggish box

[jonnyr]

Hi, I'm a very inexperienced unix user who is developing on a remote box. The box is running like a pig, frequently bogging.

I am running itools and WebCatalog.

The webCatalog is doing a lot of crashing, and I have been restarting the server through the itools_admin page.

Finally, I used the unix command 'shutdown -r now' to restart the box, but this has only resulted in the whole box running slower.

Any ideas.

 

[willywonka]

Here are some ideas: First of all, Linux is stable enough that a crashed application will not crash the O/S. I'd be really surprised if it does. You should be able to recover without rebooting the box but you probably don't know how.

It's good to say what distribution of Linux you are using and what kind of box it is on (cpu speed, ram, drive space...). If you are working remotely, with telnet or something, you can open up an alternate telnet session to see what the machine is doing when the first session hangs. If you are using a remote Xwindows session you can still do the same thing. Here's some things to try. And look these up in the man pages to get a better idea of what they do.

run 'uptime'. this will give you your system load. If the any of the 3 numbers at the end of the line are over 1.0 you are loading your system. If below 1.0 the system is not stained ( this is approximate ).

run 'top' which you can do from a telnet session. This will give you a dynamically updated list of system processes sorted by highest cpu usage at the top. You can see from this what process is using the most cpu and if it is hogging the system.

There are other commands like iostat and vmstat which would require more discussion. You can look them up. They show aspects of system usage.

using ps -ef (pipe to more) will show you all the processes that are running and if you find the one that is hung you can kill it ( kill -9 process-number). That will blow it away without needing a reboot. You can then restart the application.

It is curious that the box runs slower after a reboot. That is not likely. I don't have enough info to comment on that. Linux is not Windows. It does not get constipated like Windows does. It will be your application that is causing the problem.

 

[jonnyr]

Thanks! great info to get me rolling!

 

[jonnyr]

I should first say that I'm not running Linux. So I don't have a 'top' command, although that seems like the right info to gather.

I'm also fumbling to find commands to give you the info requested.

Running the 'uptime' command produced:
5:05PM up 2:24, 1 user, load averages: 3.04, 3.15, 3.15

which seems to indicate the trouble you were looking for there!

 

[MikeLacey]

John,

What version of UNIX are you running? Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.