This post is going to be an account of few trouble-shootings I did recently to combat various I/O sluggishness. Slow system during problems with backup We have a NFS mount where we push backups of our database daily. Due to some update to the NFS infra, we started seeing throughput of NFS server drastically affected. During this time we saw general sluggishness in the system during backups. Even ssh logins appeared slower. Some boxes had to be rebooted due to this sluggishness as they were too slow to operate on them. First question we wanted to answer, does NFS keep writing if the server is slow? The slow server applied back pressure by sending small advertised window(TCP) to clients. So clients can't push huge writes if server is affected. Client writes to its page cache. The data from page cache is pushed to server when there is a memory pressure or file close is called. If server is slow, client can easily reach upto dirty_background_ratio set for page cache in sysctl. This