Joseph,
There are a few problems. It does seem like your system is running low
on memory. This is supported by swap being used, along with the si and
so showing activity just recently. However, it seems like your CPU is
getting a bit of a workout.
One thing is your cs, or Context Switching, is pretty high at 1,680.
While this alone isn't a problem, since most CPUs can context switch
with very little impact, when you add in the 393 interrupts in the same
time period, that can be a problem. Yet, this depends on the output of
the vmstat itself. If this is the first line of the vmstat output, then
it is not good. A good idea would be to run vmstat as:
vmstat -n 5 3
which will run vmstat 3 times, with a 5 second pause between each.
The last 4 items are the biggies. Your CPU is spending 47% of it's time
running application code, 13% running kernel code, 17% idle, and 23%
waiting. This means that 83% of the time, your CPU was either running
code, or waiting for the disk, or other IO device, to get it the data it
needed to run code. While that might seem good in that the CPU is idle
17% of the time, that is just a snapshot of the last few seconds, and
therefore you can assume that that idle time is fluctuating a lot.
However, it is spending more time waiting, very likely for the hard
drive, than it is idle. To see what items are taking up most of the
CPU time, just run top once with:
top -n 1
and that will give you a list of programs sorted by CPU resource time.
So, my verdict is... while your system is not doing great on memory,
your hard drive is getting to be a bottle neck for the system overall.
You should look at what programs are running and if there are any that
can be closed out normally. Also, a new(er) hard drive should help. It
could be that your current one is starting to have problems which is
slowing it down. Switching hard drives, especially if you can go to a
SATA, would be really helpful.
Thanks,
Chris
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