Okay, so which are the appropriate utilities to find if your machine performance is in
good shape?
Well, I would say have a look at top.
And when you look at top, what are you looking at?
Well, first, have a look at the load average.
As you can see, load average, the three values are below one, very close to zero.
So for the last one, five, and 15 minutes on average, nothing seriously is going on.
Second thing that I would like to check is the memory usage.
Now you might think 265 megabytes of memory free, that is not a lot, but that's not what
you should be looking at.
You should be looking at the available memory, and the available memory is 2056 megabytes.
This available memory is explained by everything currently stored in buffers and in cache,
which can be discarded at any moment when memory is needed for anything else.
So that's also looking good.
Then we can see the idle loop on this system is about 90%, 80% right now, and if you keep
on observing it, it stays around 90%.
That means that 90% of capacity of the system is unused.
Now if you have many CPU cores, sometimes you might see a high idle loop and still there
might be one CPU core that hit very hard.
Press one to get a line for every single one CPU core.
This is a two-core system, and on this two-core system, nothing is hidden here.
So all is looking good.
Conclusion, this system is looking good.
And also good to know, what are you going to use to analyze your system performance
in general?
TOP.
TOP is the starting point, and only when you find signs of disturbed system performance,
then it is recommended to use something else.