CareerCup

I think it's important to define the problem first:
- what does slow mean? high latency? for which percentile of requests? all, a few, e.g. 5%? Where is it measured (could it be, it's not the server but too much traffic, so server receives the request already late and it takes too long to deliver to client, ...) best is, draw a picture, with the server(s) the infrastructure around until the point of measurement... worst case it's the end customer telling you this with no additional information.
- are there any service level objectives (SLO's) defined one can compare against?
- is there history data? did high latency increase slowly?
- when did it change? was it due to a new release or no modifications
- what diagnostics is available?
Potential issues are:
- the server it self is overloaded (e.g. to much disc usage)
- the server contacts other services and waits for them (e.g. a slow service in the back end)
- the CPU is overloaded because some CPU bound processes eat away CPU power
- to many services use too much memory, the system keeps swapping in and out
- data grew, current sharding scheme may not be effective anymore
- OS update, a new network stack or driver?
- etc. etc. etc. etc.

I think a systematic approach could be
- verify / assume objectives
- narrow down the service(s) causing delay (DB cluster, app server cluster, what services specifically)
this is starting at the front-end service: what's the delay between receive request and served request? does this include the delay causing problems? If yes: go down, check the call graphs to other services, is there any call causing the delay? If yes, move to this server and repeat there
- look into the server(s) what is causing the delay (disc, cpu, memory (e.g. page faults))
- verify history data if available (sudden change, continuous process)

Points need to consider to solve the problem of slow server.
1. We need to check the load on the server.
2. We need to check if any process is taking 100% cpu or not.
3. we need to check the permSize and heap Size on the server.
These are some of the steps i will consider if sever is slow.

May be a question of monitoring Health watchdogs & Disaster Recovery with Failover in distributed environment.