Incoming support call...
«TT»09:04:41] liqua : hello?
[09:04:46] Jason M : Good morning
[09:05:29] liqua : quick question, my sites are coming up real slow, when i ssh in and run top, thats running slow, any ideas?
«/TT»
Why, yes. I have many ideas.
It could be a bad hard drive. Bad memory. Damaged network cable. Frayed wiring to the IDE controller. Processor overheat. Dust shorting contacts on the motherboard. Swap is full. Load is too high. Apache has gone berzerk and is leaving zombies. A fork bomb. Someone is running an IRC server with attack scripts. Perhaps the switch is going bad. Maybe you don't know how to code proper Perl and PHP, and your sites just suck. Maybe you've loaded a fifty megabyte media file at the top of your HTML layout and you have a 120 baud line driver for a modem. Something could be miscompiled. You could be an idiot, or high, or clueless, or out of phase and have lost the ability to monitor the flow of time. The switch could be set to "less magic". The fat electrons are caught in a kink of the cable. MySQL might be running a thousand processes. The disk could be full or mangled. /tmp might be mounted on a nonexistant filesystem. The PCI slots could have peanut butter smeared on them. An rm -fr * could be in progress. Sendmail may have a full queue. Incoming Godzilla and Christmas packets. Phase of the moon. Cosmic rays. Nuclear fallout. A swift boat has crashed nearby, and fragments thereof have lodged themselves on the video controller. A passing tech dropped a magnet into the ventilation slots.
Wait, where are you going? I HAVE MORE IDEAS! COME BACK!
Such elegance. It is like reading a textual version of a master fencer slicing away at an financial consultant. You almost want to feel bad for the guy, but then you figure... nah... there are plenty more where that one came from.