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I have a machine that I'm trying to troubleshoot -- could be a hardware problem, could potentially be a software problem. It's a Dell PowerEdge 2950 (with a couple of dual-core 3.5GHz Xeons) and I've just installed CentOS 6.2 on it.
If I do 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null', I get transfer rates of around 30 MB/s. On other similar machines, I'm getting 500 MB/s or even 1.2 GB/s. So something is clearly amiss -- as far as I can tell, something must be sucking up the machine's CPU power (that dd doesn't do any I/O), but neither mpstat nor sar shows me anything obvious. Nor are there any messages in /var/log/messages or /var/log/dmesg that tell me about re-presenting interrupts or the like.
So I'm somewhat out of ideas -- the machine is clearly sick but I can't figure out how. I'd love any bright ideas for things to try!
troubleshooting is troubleshooting, regardless of what has the issue. Remove any preconceived notions you may have, detail every possibility regardless of the probability, loosely organize the possibilities as most probable first, and start going through them. For example, if you suspect the OS is at fault, remove the OS by booting to a LiveCD environment. Then test. – Bon Gart – 2012-06-13T23:46:43.367