Monitoring resources bottleneck

I am switching to a new system, because of performance issues (and because upgrading is always fun). The main things I encountered previously was Firefox getting unworkably slow at times, and the same for LibreOffice applications. I gave things more memory and vCPUs but as my current system only has 2 cores, I believe that could be the bottleneck too. I’m also using SATA in an optical drive caddy, which is not the best for speed either.

Anyways! I was wondering, would anyone have a nice idea how to determine what the bottlenecks currently are? Ideally, I would like to see that for AppVM A is using X% of the total CPU power, Y% of total RAM, limited to read/write speeds of Z Mb/s for example. I found Task Manager within Dom0, but I think I lack knowledge to interpret the data to conclude what VMs (or dom0) are running into which bottlenecks.

Please share if you have a recommended method for finding the bottlenecks and tweaking the assigned resources on your system!

I looked at xen-and-per-vm-monitoring and conky discussion already, but I saw some controversy around the effectiveness of both tools.

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I stumbled into that topic as well! The proposed solution of running in safe mode made no changes for me unfortunately. Also, it is not as bad as OP from that topic, since I don’t see crazy spikes in the CPU usage on that VM. I checked it by running top in the same AppVM as I run libreoffice in. Still, scrolling is just sluggish and generally a laggy experience.

Yes, cannot work with Firefox anymore, Dom0 xentop shows Dom0 constantly over 100% and firefox VM that used to work ok now shows 260% Xentop usage even though the ff task manager shows very low resources are used.

I wonder if this has something to do with nvidia card i am using but do not have the time right now to replace it.

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Thanks, I didn´t know about xentop! Do you have any idea how I could go about quantifying the upgrade for going from SATA SSD to NVME SSD? Or better yet, finding what component is screaming for an upgrade the loudest in general?

i have been using nvme for years now, it helps with starting up with a lot of VMs, though i am not sure if all the drivers in Qubes/Xen are actually using my models full potential.

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Note that while xentop gives best information, you can add cpu usage and disk usage to the panel for constant monitoring.

Also, i believe there is no xen equivalent to iotop

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