If the system starts working slower and you have no clue why, it's time to check resources usage on your VPS. You can find this information in a control panel, in SolusVM panel or via SSH. We will explain the latter.
Here is a list of the most common commands and /proc files by which it is possible to determine system hardware information and resources usage.
CPU information:
CPU information can be found at /proc/cpuinfo file:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
CPU usage information can be viewed via
top command
top - the percentage of CPU idle time (it can be considered as free CPU time) is specified in raw “Cpu(s):”, value “id”.
top will show what processes are currently running in the server and how much CPU rate they take. The displayed information is periodically updated as the values in the summary part and in the process list change.
%CPU will show the percentage of CPU time usage by the process.
%MEM will show the percentage of memory usage by the process.
Disk information:
Disk partition information (not available for OpenVZ VPSs):
fdisk -l
Disk space usage:
df -h
–h flag gives an output in human-readable format and the size values are shown in KB, MB or GB instead of just KB.
df –h shows the file system name (Filesystem), the total size of the disk space (Size), the used (Used) and available (Avail) disk space, the percentage of the disk space usage (Use%) and, finally, the mount point (Mounted on).
Inode information (not available for OpenVZ VPSs):
df –i
File space usage (not available for OpenVZ VPSs):
du –h /root – displays /root directory size and all the subdirectories
du –sh /root – displays /root directory size
Check the bad blocks (not available for OpenVZ VPSs):
badblocks -v /dev/hda1 – where hda1 is the disk device name.
Test the reading speed (hdparm is not included in all Linux distributions by default so additional installation may be required) (not available for OpenVZ VPSs):
hdparm -tT /dev/hda1 – where hda1 is the disk device name.
Show DMI information (not available for VPSs):
dmidecode -q
Memory information:
Amount of free and used memory:
free –m
Detailed memory usage report:
cat /proc/meminfo
Just another tool:
vmstat
Network interfaces:
Detailed list of network interfaces:
ifconfig
Learn more about helpful command in our blog post 'Linux commands every admin should know' and 'Linux commands every admin should know (Part II)'.
