From owner-freebsd-performance@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Sep 11 11:44:00 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EAC9A16A4BF; Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:44:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rhombus.znep.com (sense-sea-MegaSub-1-507.oz.net [216.39.145.253]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CF7E043FE1; Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:43:59 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from marcs@znep.com) Received: by rhombus.znep.com (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 7BE3F1A291; Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:43:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by rhombus.znep.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FF021AAA6; Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:43:58 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:43:58 -0700 (PDT) From: Marc Slemko To: John Straiton In-Reply-To: <008501c3786a$95aaefa0$1916c60a@win2k.clickcom.com> Message-ID: References: <008501c3786a$95aaefa0$1916c60a@win2k.clickcom.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Performance Problems.. Server hardware smoked by $500 box? X-BeenThere: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Performance/tuning List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 18:44:01 -0000 On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, John Straiton wrote: > Greets! > > I'm pretty confused right now with trying to determine the nature of a > performance problem I'm having on one of my servers. The server is a > webserver with a separate db/file server sitting behind it. The issue is > that in pulling up websites from the machine, my silly POS development > box has nearly double performance although one would think it shouldn't. you need to quantify the performance differences starting with replicating what you see, and work down from there. Do the differences in the numbers you posted mean anything? No idea. I wouldn't expect them to make any difference for a single user hitting the server, but it is possible they are related to some problem somewhere. The easiest way to tell, however, is to start with the problem you do see (ie. things are slow loading) and work down through the software stack from there. The first step would be to try to quantify the performance difference in serving the actual web pages. Find a single page that you think is slow on the production system and that can be accessed without having to be part of a session, and quantify the performance difference for that page. Remember you don't care about high load, just a single user request. You could use apachebench ("ab", comes with apache... something like "ab -c 1 -n 20 http://server/path/to/page") or any simple command line tool that you can time (eg. repeatedly run "time GET http://server/path/to/page"). Do this from as near as possible to the box you are running the web browser that sees the slowness loading. Until you can reproduce and quantify a performance difference at this level, don't worry about digging deeper. Once you can, keep taking one step closer. Try requesting a page that doesn't hit the database. Try setting things up so NFS isn't being used. Try making the request from the same machine the web server is running on. etc. Your goal here is to eliminate as many components as possible while still being able to reproduce the high level problem. So, for example, if you can reproduce it on a page that doesn't hit the database... you can eliminate that from further consideration. Unless your application is extremely heavyweight and demanding on hardware, or there is some bug in one of the drivers or configuration, none of the hardware differences would normally have any effect on the symptoms you say you are seeing.