A Linux administrator is troubleshooting a server that exhibits extremely sluggish terminal behavior. Commands entered in an SSH session take a long time to execute, and the overall system feels unresponsive. The administrator runs the top command and observes a consistently high value (over 30%) for the %wa statistic. What is the most likely cause of this performance issue?
The correct answer is high I/O wait time. The %wa statistic in the top command output represents the percentage of time the CPU is idle while waiting for an Input/Output (I/O) operation to complete. A consistently high value indicates that the system is bottlenecked by disk or network I/O, not by CPU processing power. While a memory leak can lead to swapping (which is a form of I/O), the direct interpretation of high %wa is I/O wait. A CPU bottleneck would be indicated by high %us (user) or %sy (system) values. Insufficient network bandwidth could cause latency in the SSH connection itself, but would not be reflected as a high %wa value related to CPU state on the server.
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