A system administrator notices that a production server is experiencing significant slowdowns. Upon further investigation using the top
command, it's observed that the I/O wait percentage is consistently above 30%. Considering that the server's disk activity is not excessively high, what could be a probable cause for the high I/O wait?
A misconfigured network firewall is limiting incoming connections.
The hard drive is failing, causing read/write operations to take longer than usual.
Insufficient memory available for buffer/cache leading to frequent disk access.
The I/O scheduler is configured for a single-threaded process, leading to a bottleneck.