This chapter overviews the system-wide Linux performance tools. These tools are your first line of defense when tracking a performance problem. They can show you how the overall system is performing and which areas are misbehaving. This chapter discusses the statistics that these tools can measure and how to use the individual tools to gather those statistics. After reading this chapter, you should
Understand the basic metrics of system-wide performance, including CPU usage
Understand which tools can retrieve these system-wide performance metrics