measuring unix machine responsiveness

Question

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!"

I want to collect some "data" to quantify responsiveness. What can I do?

I can run shell commands like top periodically with cron and collect statistics, but I am clueless regarding what is a good statistic to go after.

Answer 1

You could use the time command to measure how long it takes to execute a simple command (e.g. ls) in "real" (wall-clock) time. Also, you could periodically record the statistics from uptime, which shows how many tasks are currently being executed. If this number is usually higher than the number of processors available, then you have processes waiting.