System Monitoring Commands
top, htop, vmstat, iostat, free, and uptime — the commands for reading CPU, memory, disk I/O, and load on a live Linux system.
Jan 20, 2026
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Performance
11 articles
High Load Average
A runbook for interpreting and diagnosing a high Linux load average — and why it doesn't automatically mean a CPU problem.
Jan 20, 2026
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Slow Disk I/O
A runbook for diagnosing storage-bound performance problems on Linux — reading iostat correctly and telling apart a slow disk from a slow …
Jan 20, 2026
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High CPU Usage
A runbook for diagnosing sustained high CPU usage on a Linux server — from identifying the offending process down to the exact thread and …
Jan 20, 2026
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Application Latency Spiked After Migrating EC2 to ECS Fargate
Your application's p99 latency increased 3× after moving from EC2 to ECS Fargate. Diagnose the root cause — cold starts, DNS delays, missing …
Jan 20, 2025
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DynamoDB Hot Partition During a Flash Sale — Diagnose and Fix
Your DynamoDB table is experiencing hot partition issues during peak traffic. Debug using CloudWatch metrics, implement write sharding, DAX …
Jan 20, 2025
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Optimising a Slow Data Processing Pipeline
Reduce a 10-million-row CSV batch job from 4 hours to under 30 minutes using chunked bulk inserts and multiprocessing.
Jan 20, 2025
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CPU-Bound Task Blocking the Async Event Loop
Fix a FastAPI service that becomes unresponsive during image thumbnail generation by offloading CPU-bound work to a process pool or task …
Jan 20, 2025
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Application Latency Spiked After Migrating EC2 to ECS Fargate
Your application's p99 latency increased 3× after moving from EC2 to ECS Fargate. Diagnose the root cause — cold starts, DNS delays, missing …
Jan 20, 2025
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Slow API Endpoint: N+1 Query Problem
Fix a Django REST endpoint responding in 8 seconds for 500 users by eliminating N+1 queries with annotate() and prefetch_related().
Jan 20, 2025
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DynamoDB Hot Partition During a Flash Sale — Diagnose and Fix
Your DynamoDB table is experiencing hot partition issues during peak traffic. Debug using CloudWatch metrics, implement write sharding, DAX …
Jan 20, 2025
Read more