monline

The DebuggingLTSP page at the Ubuntu Wiki lists a number of tools that can help isolate various issues like problems with power saving modes (ie. power usage in idle state), monitoring various system performance metrics (cpu, mem, network, discs), etc.

Some of the listed tools at the moment are:

• PowerTOP: helps you find those programs that are misbehaving while your computer is idle
• LatencyTOP: helps you identify where in the system latency is happening and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen. Focuses on the type of latency that causes skips in audio, stutters in your desktop experience or that overloads your server (while you have plenty of CPU power left).
• SystemTap: provides software infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux system. This assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem.
• ntop: a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does.