Need Help Diagnosing Server Wierdness

[Michael Butash]

I usually find when that is happening, something is clobbering the 
system, very short, very fast, and gone again.  Try using htop -d 1 and 
watching it closely during that stall to see what you see pegging 
resources.  IOwait can be an issue too for that if you have slow disks 
with something short/fast accessing a chunk of data.

I don't notice so much anymore this with 2+ cores on a desktop, but this 
is/was common for single-core/thead devices (like my android).

-mb


On 05/25/2013 11:59 AM, Mark Phillips wrote:
> I have an old headless server running Linux version 2.6.32-5-686 (Debian
> 2.6.32-48squeeze1) (dannf at debian.org <mailto:dannf at debian.org>) (gcc
> version 4.3.5 (Debian 4.3.5-4) ). Recently, when I log in using ssh the
> terminal window freezes for a few seconds, then usually comes back. The
> command line stops printing the characters I am typing, the cursor stops
> blinking, and then after a few seconds, it comes back. This happens
> every few minutes, so it is becoming rather annoying.
>
> When I check the disks, I get
> # df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1             182G   42G  131G  25% /
> tmpfs                 505M     0  505M   0% /lib/init/rw
> udev                  500M  140K  500M   1% /dev
> tmpfs                 505M     0  505M   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/sdb1             230G  146G   72G  67% /mnt/sdb
>
> So I am not running out of disk space.
>
> When I run top, I get this output:
> Tasks:  90 total,   3 running,  87 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  7.0%us,  3.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 82.7%id,  6.6%wa,  0.3%hi,  0.3%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem:   1032748k total,  1013748k used,    19000k free,   242992k buffers
> Swap:  2017272k total,     1040k used,  2016232k free,   473584k cached
>
> So I am not running a process that is taking over the CPU.
>
> How should I go about diagnosing this problem?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark
>
>
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