The philosophy behind "Stroll": continuous learning, curiosity‑driven, and practice‑focused.
Learn the theory behind Linux CPU usage metrics, how the kernel’s jiffies and /proc/stat values are interpreted, the formula for calculating utilization over intervals, and practical commands like top, ps, and pidstat to observe real‑time CPU performance on servers and desktops.
This article explains the key CPU performance metrics on Linux—including load average, CPU usage percentages, and process states—showing how to interpret top, ps, uptime, and mpstat outputs and how to differentiate between load and utilization in various workload scenarios.
This guide explains when CPU context switches happen, how to monitor them with vmstat and pidstat, interprets key metrics such as cswch and nvcswch, and provides step‑by‑step analysis techniques for identifying and troubleshooting CPU performance issues on Linux systems.
This article explains how the CPU executes instructions, the roles of processes and threads, the structure of a process control block, and the different types of context switches in Linux, highlighting why these mechanisms impact overall system performance.
This article walks through a comprehensive set of Linux disk I/O optimizations—including hardware health checks, SSD adoption, RAID configuration, block‑device scheduler tuning, sector size alignment, filesystem selection, swap and huge‑page settings, kernel cache tweaks, third‑party caches, and application‑level strategies—to dramatically improve storage throughput and latency.
This guide walks through using strace together with lsof, vmstat, iostat, and pidstat in a four‑step workflow to pinpoint Linux filesystem bottlenecks, covering VFS core calls, system load checks, disk utilization, per‑process I/O analysis, and detailed file‑operation tracing.
This article explains the Linux storage I/O stack, breaks down disk latency into transmission, queue, and processing time, shows how to measure each part with tools like iostat and disktool, and provides a step‑by‑step checklist for diagnosing high disk latency.
This guide explains Linux disk performance indicators—utilization, saturation, IOPS, throughput, and latency—their interrelationships, and how to monitor both overall and per‑process I/O using tools like iotop, pidstat, and the /proc filesystem.
This article explains Linux disk hardware basics, the block device workflow, I/O scheduler options, how to view and change the scheduler, and key performance metrics such as utilization, saturation, IOPS, throughput, and response time using tools like iostat.
After noticing 14 GB free RAM but a fully used 29 GB swap, the article explains how to diagnose hidden swap consumption using tools like smem and swap_stat_show, clarifies the difference between free’s Swap used and /proc/*/status VmSwap, and shows how adjusting transparent_hugepage defrag and toggling swap can reclaim the space.
