John Straiton writes: > I'm pretty confused right now with trying to > determine the nature of a performance problem ... > on one of my servers. ... in pulling up websites > from the machine, my silly POS development > box has nearly double performance ...
There's lots of tricky stuff that can be going wrong. I spent some time in my last two jobs (anybody got a new one in NJ?) on speeding up stuff like this and the first thing I try to do is put some kind of steady-state load on the boxen and monitor each box involved with systat 1 -vmstat . There's one hell of a lot of information there, and interactions are sometimes hard to see. If the CPU is fully occupied, it could be the network stack (which will NOT show up at interrupt level) and that can depend on what interface chipset you're using as well. Or it could be ... well, get the data first. If you'd like to send me a few sample screens, I'll try to make suggestions on what to check next. You want to have a series from each of the three configurations you're using. And being able to _watch_ what's happening on systat is worth a whole lot of non-sequenced snapshots. Are you running firewall software on the production machine? I don't know how the FreeBSD version will affect performance, but it can't help. How about the reports from top ? What do they say? What's soaking up the processor? Running on a 1GHz PIII two years ago, I was able to get a web proxy (not squid!) to serve 1500+ requests per second, with about 200 MBit/sec of ethernet traffic (inbound and out). (The product never made it into full-scale production, largely due to financial problems in the large, well-known corporation.) So the problem isn't horsepower, but something not using it well. Can you try running the back end box on a simple disk without the RAID in the way? I don't recall all the properties of RAID 5 right now, but in general RAID trades disk transactions away to get disk throughput. In your application, you probably need transactions more than throughput. Dumb question: have you tried swapping cables/ports on the ethernet connections? Does one link support jumbo frames and the other not? How about network buffers: have you got enough configured, and how many are tied up at a time? Performance is often a negative art: find the worst roadblock and remove it, then the next worst after that, and so forth. Mark Terribile __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"