[dundee] Investigating resource hungry processes

[Andrew Clayton]

On Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:06:43 +0100 (BST), Marcel Hecko wrote:

> Hi Iain,
> 
> we are using `iotop`, `ps` (ps -efH) and `lsof` (lsof -i for sockets)
> to digg into the resources usage on the system.

Yeah, all good.  strace is also useful. Like others, top is about the
very thing I look at, gives a good overall look at the current
situation.

Then of course you have /proc/PID with an abundance of information
(where most of the above get their information from).

Your lsof is useful in conjunction with /prot/PID/fd (list of open file
descriptors for that process)

pmap can be useful to view a processes memory mapping.

I highly recommend to install the sysstat package, which will do
periodic system stats gathering which can be queried with the sar
command (people from a Solaris background will probably recognise this).

This also includes iostat (like vmstat, but for blockdevices/filesystems).


Andrew