Improve Your Linux Performance With These Crucial Debugging Tools

When working with a Linux server, issues occur. The system may experience slow downs, or database failures. There are several methods of fixing these issues. You can print messages or use a debugger; and if your experienced enough you can make a few educated guesses to fix the problem. But whatever you do, you have to find the source of the problem in order to fix it. So, if an application continually crashes you want to find the line of code that causes it; once found you can figure out why the error occurred. The following tools can all help to speed up your detection of the problem.

1 – SAR
This tool has two main functions. It has the ability to monitor the performance of the CPU, memory or I/O functionality, and it can list performance data and analyse it to find any bottleneck issue. Its specific issues include:
• CPU statistics
• Memory usage data
• I/O functionality
• Swap spaced used
• Report load data
• Network data
2 – httperf
This tool offers statistics on the web server performance with regards to the HTTP protocol. It helps you measure the statistics of the number of HTTP GET requests made on the server and the number of responses that are returned. Among other metrics it offers the rate of responses that arrive. When using this tool be sure to run only one httperf process per client machine at a time when there are very few background processes running.
3 – Tcpdump
A network packet analyzer allowing you to view the packets and analyze them for performance issues. The tcpdump allows you to capture packets based on your custom conditions. For example, you can capture those that flow through a specific port, or the TCP communication between two hosts or those that belong to a specific protocol.
4 – Nagios
An open-source tool that allows you to monitor the server infrastructure. This tool constantly monitors the system and informs you of any issues occurring at that moment. So, if a server goes down, the tool sends a notification to the sysadmin team. Or when something happens to the database, it notifies the DBA team. In the same way it notifies the appropriate personnel of any issue with any component of the system. Nagios offers monitoring for:
• Hardware
• Linux and windows servers
• Database infrastructures
• Custom applications
• Web servers
5 – NVPerfKit
A complete performance kit that helps debug OpenGL and Direct3D functionality. It allows you access to low-level performance counters in the driver and hardware components of the GPU. These counters demonstrate how the application uses the GPU to identify performance problems and once fixed that the components are working as they should.
Bottlenecks can be a frequent problem for administrators. While these are all fixable issues, you need to know where the problem is first. The various debugging tools inform you of these bottlenecks or issues which could affect your network before they become a real problem.