Every sysadmin eventually encounters a system that isn’t technically down—but is clearly not doing well. It responds slowly, logs look fine, CPU usage is “not that bad,” and yet everything feels like it’s running through molasses.
This is the story of a performance incident where a server slowly degraded into existential confusion, and the admin had to figure out whether the problem was CPU, memory, I/O, or just bad life choices.
The First Symptom: “It’s Just a Bit Slow”
It always starts with user complaints:
“The app is slow”
