Smart trick to check some bottlenecks in your DB

There’s a nice tool called iostat to check the HDD related info, like number of reads/writes, amount of data processed, etc. It’s a must have for any good sysadmin, as it allows you to identify some of the bottlenecks in the DB.

Together with the vmstat tool - allows a user to see statistics for the virtual memory usage - form a powerful duo to use, especially when your DB is running very slow, but the processors are not fully used.

The tools have enough explanations on the man pages.

So, the only thing remaining is to start them up:

Open 2 terminal windows. The first one would run something like iostat -dx 10 (will display the device extended report, refreshed every 10 seconds - you can increase/decrease this number to suite your needs - too small is not very good, as it’s better to have stats over a longer period). The second one should run vmstat 10.

Last but not least, to get them you need to install the sysstat package (vmstat is in the procps package, installed by default). For ubuntu, type: sudo apt-get install sysstat.

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