How can I find out if a process is CPU, Memory or Disk-bound?

How can I find out if a process is bound to CPU, Memory or Disk?

That requires some expert skills. It depends. Example:

• If there's enough of memory and disks don't seem too busy, it may be CPU-bound. Look at CPU usage and if its bordering at 100% it's CPU bound. If it's not there's an artificial bottleneck in the implementation. E.g. on a dual-core CPU a single threaded process will not go above 50% CPU usage.

• If CPU and memory are available, but disks are very busy, or IO latency seems high, its likely that its IO bound. See if adding more disks (RAID?) helps.

• None of the above? Check memory available.

• Enough memory? There may be an artificial bottleneck in the process itself i.e. maybe someone forgot to remove a sleep(1)? Naah its not that easy usually. ;)

There's a reason why we have a whole lab for performance engineers in most companies dealing with performance sensitive products!

Use tools like sar, vmstat, iostat, oprofile, lockstat, dtrace, product specific perf monitoring tools etc, to debug perf problems.

check out iotop, can be useful

A tool that can be useful for real-time checking a number of process statistics (memory, cpu-usage, I/O, etc.) is htop. It doesn't replace the more specialised tools named by Sudhanshu, but might be a good start.

As well as the other tools mentioned, run ps l PID, inserting the relevant process id, or look at the STATE and WCHAN columns in top or htop.

If it's in D (for disk) state, then it's doing file IO. This could be because it's either reading a lot of files, or because it's using a lot of memory and swapping. The WCHAN column will tell you what kernel function it's inside; googling for them or asking here may give you some indication what they mean.

If it's in R (run) state, it's using the CPU in user space, in other words it's CPU bound at that moment.

If it's in S (sleep) state, it's inside an interruptible system call, which may mean it's either actually sleeping, or it's doing something like waiting for network traffic or a lock. Again, looking at the specific wchan will tell you more.

See also What is the "Waiting Channel" of a process?