Chapter 2. Troubleshooting Active Processes

A deeper understanding of the underlying active processes in CentOS 7 is an essential skill for any troubleshooter. From high load averages to slow response times, system overloads to dead and dying processes, there comes a time when every server may start to feel sluggish, act impoverished, or fail to respond, and as a consequence, it will require your immediate attention.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Learn about memory management, swap, swappiness, and thrashing
  • Learn how to analyze active processes using the vmstat, top, and ps commands
  • Learn how to monitor the server with iotop, iostat, and lsof
  • Learn about system load and systemd
  • Learn how to find process IDs, identify parent process IDs and orphaned processes, ...

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