I have two VPSs through ChicagoVPS (who are very good, would recommend to anyone) both hosted in different locations. Lately I've had a bunch of slowness on one of them, but its been very sporadic. It'll be slow for a little while, and then magically just fine. If I run this test:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync;unlink test
I get mixed results. It'll be 17.7 MB/s, 22.5 MB/s, even 7.7 MB/s, but then it jumps back up to the normal >100MB/s.
I submitted a ticket, and at the time they ran their test on the main node, it didn't report slow. My question(s) is/are this: what can I do to make sure that (a) it's not something on my VPS that I'm doing that's slowing things down and (b) that I'm not being a pesky annoying customer saying "oh my node is slow, I've tested it and its slow fix it"?