[CentOS] Question on server speed

[mark]

Jerry Geis wrote:
>
> I have a customer server with 32 cores, 128G ram i7960X. So nice box...
>
> Why is it that "all" I am really doing at the moment is copying things to
>  an external SSD disk USB3 connected and the machine "freezes"... Why is
> that?
>
> clearly plenty of CPU RAM everything... I can see "blocking" to write data
> to the external disk - but there are 31 other cores and plenty of memory
> to make it "seem" as nothing is happening right now.
>
> Do I need to 'tweak' something to no see GUI freezes... Waiting on
> characters to show - even remoted in with SSH experiences the same thing -
>  so its not just X.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions.
>
What's top show? And maybe iostat?

     mark