Quantifying responsiveness in solaris machine

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!"

What is some good representative data, that I can collect, to quantify "responsive-ness"?

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

Answer 1

From your description it could also be a network problem. To analyze that scenario you could do a long term ping session with statistics - between your PC and the server.

I would favor the network as the bad guy, since the sysadmins are probably looking at sar, vmstat, or iostat. And they do not see a problem.

Answer 2

http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/03/01/the-use-method-solaris-performance-checklist/ provides a checklist of common statistics to gather for various cases when starting to track down performance issues on Solaris systems.