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Posted May 13, 2008

vmstat and tail make a great sandwich

To diagnose a slow web server, interleave vmstat and tail.

vmstat and tail make a great sandwich

This article by Erik Rose

Have an inexplicably slow web server? By running vmstat and tailing your web logs at the same time, you can get a good sense of what requests are causing swapping or blocking on i/o or pegging the CPU or whatever:

vmstat -a -Sm 1 &
tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 0  0    572    202      7    223    0    0    12     0   17   71  8  0 91  0
 1  0    572    202      7    223    0    0     0     0   17   42  1  0 99  0
66.249.66.225 - - [07/May/2008:11:32:14 -0400] "GET /trac/weblion/browser/weblion/Mobilize?rev=3484 HTTP/1.1" 200 3331 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
 0  0    572    349      7    223    0    0     0    96   33  116  4  1 94  0
66.249.66.225 - - [07/May/2008:11:32:15 -0400] "GET /trac/weblion/browser/users/ems174/AppleScripts?rev=3521 HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
 0  0    572    349      7    223    0    0     0     0    8   29  0  0 100  0
66.249.66.225 - - [07/May/2008:11:32:17 -0400] "GET /trac/weblion/browser/weblion/debian/cosign/trunk/Makefile.in?rev=2795 HTTP/1.1" 200 4160 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
 0  0    572    349      7    223    0    0     0     0   25   67  2  0 98  0
66.249.66.225 - - [07/May/2008:11:32:18 -0400] "GET /trac/weblion/browser/weblion/SQIConnector?rev=3485 HTTP/1.1" 200 3259 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
 0  0    572    349      7    223    0    0     0    36   37   85  2  0 97  1

The advantage this has over just running top in a separate window is that you can scroll back and reread to discern patterns.

Anybody know a tool that presents this sort of thing graphically? That'd be cool.

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