I am one of the n users of a shared unix machine. For reasons unknown, the machine is not responsive enough. For example, it is slow on interactive commands, it takes few noticeable moments for any action (e.g. mouse movement, editor (e.g. gvim) keystrokes) to be visible. The problem is, the people supposedly responsible for addressing the issue do not agree that the machine is not responsive. They do some few simple things and say, It works fine!How can responsiveness be quantified? What (all) can I measure?I can run shell commands (e.g. top) periodically with cron and collect statistics, but I am clueless regarding what is a good statistic to go after.EDITI connect to the machine over VMC.
Quantify unix responsiveness
performance;solaris;monitoring
This isn't strictly speaking the same as responsiveness, but one metric you should probably check is the system load average; uptime will show the average over the last 1/5/15 minutes:$ uptime   02:30:33 up 6 days,  6:30, 12 users,  load average: 0.85, 0.65, 0.57A high enough load will perceptibly slow the system down