Hi Folks:

I'm hoping someone has some pointers here because I'm running out of ideas and 
everyone here is somewhat frustrated.  

Regular mode of operation, eh?  :-)

A couple of weeks ago we had one of our server's motherboards begin to flake 
out. Before it actually died I moved this server's functionality to another 
server. The new server was now acting as a mysql database server and a NFS file 
server.

So, old server - Occam - was flaking out. Before the motherboard started dying 
we had what everyone thought was decent performance on the machine.

New server - Harmonia - now has Occam's duties as a mysql server and NFS file 
server. Harmonia is a machine that is at least twice as good as Occam in all 
respects save disk storage, but she's acting in a lot of respects like a 
Commodore 64.  :-(

Harmonia's specs:
 Dual AMD opteron 3.2Ghz duo core (4 processors)
6 x 2GB ECC DDR2 PC5300 RAM (12 GB)
8 x 500GB Seagate SATA300 32MB cache 7200RPM drives setup as RAID 5 (3.5 TB)
Running Fedora 10
I seem to have three problems.

1) I can't seem to copy anything with regard to this machine without its load 
average going through the roof. An scp, even a cp will drive the computer's 
load average to between 12 and 18. Copying a large file, or doing a 
mysqlhotcopy, will make the load average slowly climb, with some spikes up to 
that level. I can't think that's right. Not for something with 4 processors.

2) Whenever the load average goes above, say, 5 NFS starts seriously flaking 
out. It goes "bye-bye," stops responding, and starts disconnecting disks at the 
clients. After the load average goes down, it will come back.

NFS exports is here:

/BigBang                *(rw,insecure,sync,nohide)
/mnt/data               *(rw,insecure_locks,nohide,insecure)

/mnt/data is our RAID drive. /BigBang is an alias to /mnt/data/BigBang

3) Finally, network performance is completely in the toilet. Copying files via 
scp, or rsync, in addition to driving the load average up, seems to go at a 
rate of 2.5MB/s. I have two gigabit ethernet cards in this machine. These are 
wired to a gigabit switch. The switch is wired to the rest of the office via a 
100Mbps hub, but the issue is we got far better transfer performance from the 
old server (Occam) than we are from the new, faster server (Harmonia) and I 
can't figure out why.

Any pointers? Any thoughts?

I'm looking forward to meeting folks on the 9th.
---
Richard 'Doc' Kinne, [KQR]
American Association of Variable Star Observers
<rkinne @ aavso.org>



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