iostat - will show you what sort of IO operations are going on vmstat - will show you whats happening in the memory management of the system top - will show you cpu activity broken down by processes There is some overlap in the data from these tools but those are a good place to start. Other things that may be interesting to look into is what IO schedulers you're using. Deadline may be better for your workload than the default CFQ. To list the available io schedulers use this command. cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler This should return "noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]" To change your scheduler to deadline use the following command on the appropriate device. sudo echo "deadline" > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler-- David <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Mark van Harmelen <<a href="mailto:markvanharmelen@gmail.com">markvanharmelen@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hi everyone I've never done this before so all hints would be gratefully received. We are running a 9.04 server, with a single unthreaded process that is of interest, basically one that is busy transforming the contents of a mysql db. I want to find out if we can improve the performance of this process. Seems potential limitations are - limited by CPU speed - limited by access to mysql data on disc - limited by memory size, and therefore spending its time paging I'm wondering if anyone has any great commands and/or command options for me to start my investigations with, please. Or any strategies, words of advice, or (instructional) sources that you found useful in tuning your own systems. thanks mark -- ubuntu-server mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-server@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-server@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server</a> More info: <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam" target="_blank">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam</a> </blockquote></div>