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

[John Straiton]

> Have you tried disabling newreno?  -net has had pretty 
> extensive discussion about NFS troubles and FreeBSD around 
> the time of 4.7-4.8, if memory serves. Disabling newreno 
> seems to (have) help(ed) a large number of people.

I'm not familiar with newreno, but if the backend NFS server has stayed
the same, and the only thing in regards to NFS that has changed is that
the production machine has gone from 4.8-S to 5.1-C whilst the
development machine has sat at 5.0-R, would you still think that we
don't have a stable NFS enviroment? 


> > Now I think I just might buy (and agree) that all the difference in 
> > the world would be there if I have faster ram, faster cpu 
> AND a faster 
> > bus speed. I don't know how to determine that from the 
> DMESG tho' (it 
> > didn't seem blantantly obvious to me) so I guess I'd have to try to 
> > dig through dell's new site (the site formerly known as the best 
> > hardware vendor site when you could put in a ID # and it'd tell you 
> > everything exactly for *your* machine instead of the family of 
> > machines) to find out what it's running. I could find the MB manual 
> > for the development one to look that up if necessary.
> 
> Look 'em up, see what you find.  Hopefully, the development 
> machine will be faster.  And that could make all the difference, IMHO.
> 

Ok, Looked em up. The DELL production machine uses a p4 512k Intel chip
on a 133Mhz bus. The AMD POS we're using is on an Asus MB @ 266FSB with
an Athlon chip & DDR. It seems that you have to step up to the 2650
model Dell in order to get the bus speed up from 133. 

Methinks since the production webserver isn't doing anything but serving
pages over NFS, we'll sell the machine on ebay and buy a *pair* of POS
machines with some kinda failover set up and wind up serving 3 times as
many pageviews for 1/2 the cost of the Dell. 

I'll have to run that apachebench to get some solid #'s to show..

John Straiton
jks@ clickcom.com
Clickcom, Inc
704-365-9970x101