Most of the time your system should respond to changing demands for resources fairly well, if your system is reasonably adequate for way it's being used.  There are times when the system has problems that slow it down or its resources aren't used wisely.  Here are some commands for helping the sysadmin determine the cause and take action.  The man pages for these should explain fairly well what these are and how to use them.

• What is the system load?  Enter "uptime"
• What processes are using the most resources?  Try the command "top".
• The whole system seems sluggish, what can I do to find out about all the resources at once?  Try "osview" it will show statistics on all parts of the system.
• I want to see what user "joeblow" is doing.  How can I separate what he's doing from everyone else.  "ps -u joeblow"
• Now, I see joeblow is hogging resources.  I've asked him nicely not to do this and explained what to do, but he doesn't listen.  Enter "/etc/renice -n 10 -u joeblow" to nice his processes to 10.
• I see a hacker broke in and is running under user guest.  How can I stop it?  Enter "ps -u guest" and record the process number.  Then, "kill -9 process_number".
• How full are my disks?  Enter "df -k" to see their use.

last updated 2/28/00 by Martin McCormick, martinm@sas.upenn.edu