But it doesn't seem to be working without a tty I thought that might be a problem. Thanks for fixing it up.
iotop -b -o -n 5 Thanks. I think -n 1 is better; -n 5 is too much information. But the 7 cpus look mostly idle. I think it is almost certain that the underlying problem is disk I/O. That's been clear to me for quite a while, since the top processes are almost always in disk wait, as I said. What's not clear is how to resolve it, given that updating hardware is a massive, expensive, and unlikely-to-happen project. k