Performance Problems.. Server hardware smoked by $500 box?

[Sean Chittenden]

> > Post your kernel configs, or better yet, do a diff -u between the
> > 5.0-R and the 5.1-C kernel configs.  I bet dime to dollar you've
> > got some debugging options enabled in the 5.1-C config.  At the
> > very least you haven't remove the debugging options from your
> > malloc options.
> 
> *frown* The 5.0 development machine is running GENERIC. Being that
> we never customized the kernel, we don't have a backup copy of it. I
> can say since I'd have been the one to change it, that the only
> differences between GENERIC and what we put into service is that we
> always remove the device listings for things we don't have any use
> for, like ISA nic's and such. I almost never change any of the other
> features.

Removing unused drivers shouldn't make any difference.

> If 5.1-C has debugging on by default then , yes, I'd concur that we
> have those features turned on. However the production machine was
> 4.8-R when we noticed the problem. From what it sounds, it should
> have been faster due to that fact. The only thing that's been
> constant in this situation is that the development machine hasn't
> changed. Everything I've done has been trying to change variables on
> the production machine to either match or surpass the development to
> bring it up to it's speed.

hrm...  On your development box, do you have any boot time
configuration options set, how about differing values in sysctl.conf?

Hrm, let me re-read your original post.

Apache: Are you sure you have your reverse DNS setup correctly?  Are
	you doing host name resolution in Apache for your logs?  If
	so, turn that off!

bonnie: It's very possible that the CPU is making a difference here if
	bonnie is getting near 100% hit rates for the cache.  Given
	that you're getting good throughput, I'd double check that
	you're machines are at 100Mbps-TX, full duplex in ifconfig.  I
	bet one of them is half-duplex and that's the difference
	there.

I'm betting there are some sysctl's that are different between these
machines, along with possibly Apache and your DNS not being setup
correctly.

> Roadmap for the production machine so far:
> 
> Upgrade apache/php to newest in ports.

I haven't seen anyone claim that Apache2 is faster than Apache 1.  If
Apache2 is faster, could someone provide some evidence?

> Add RAM

This won't make a difference unless you're swapping our out of RAM.

> Upgrade OS to 5.1 from 4.8, reinstall every package in pkg_info

Downgrade you mean?  :) 4.8 is going to be more battle proven than
5.1, so I'd recommend using 4.8 for that reason alone.  If you do want
to use 5.1 for the sake of helping 5.1 become more mature, very cool.

> Update apache to 2.X from 1.3.X & reinstall php as is required

See above comment on Apache.

> Swap network interfaces between the two onboard ones

This could make some difference, but 6MBps is more than plenty
throughput for webserving via NFS.

> Swap ethernet cables with the development machine

This would impact network performance, something else is going on.

> Swap ethernet ports with the development machine

Again, this would impact network performance, and at 6MBps, that's
well more than enough for you to get reasonable performance out of a
5.1 or 4.8 box.  Something basic and simple is going on here.

DNS:
	dig my.test.box.example.com. a
	dig d.c.b.a.in-addr.arpa. ptr

apache:

	grep Hostname /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf

-sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden