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

From: John Straiton (jsmailing_at_clickcom.com)
Date: 09/11/03

  • Next message: Eric Anderson: "Re: Performance Problems.. Server hardware smoked by $500 box?" 
    To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, <freebsd-performance@freebsd.org>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 09:42:41 -0400

    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.

    Serving pages from the production machine over NFS or even the db/file
    server via local filesystem is slower than pages from the development
    machine over NFS. By that I mean that if you view the page on the
    development machine over the LAN, it appears instantly...Do that on the
    production machines and 1-2 seconds pass as you watch images flow in...
    With zero load. Now granted the development machine has the most Mhz,
    but we're talking *visible* differences in speed between a 1.5GhzAMD &
    ~1Ghz Intel Server Class machines. And to top it all off, with the
    miniscule amount of ram in the AMD box, it's paging around 50MB (with
    only a few K free of physical ram) by the time apache finshes spawning
    during the boot. By all rights, to me, this thing should be no better
    than equivalent to the production machines.

    They are all plugged in to the same Cisco 3524 switch, and I've tried
    mulitple cables (even swapping between the fast & slow machines to try
    to hurt the fast one) and the IOS reports no errors on the interfaces,
    all at 100/FullDuplex. I can reproduce the problem on any # of viewing
    machines at will.

    Please tell me that I shouldn't toss these multi-thousand dollar servers
    and just buy a bunch of these silly do-it-yourself'ers..(*kidding*, but
    you get the idea)

    The hardware involved:

    Production Machine: (Dell PowerEdge 1U server 1G/UWSCSI)
    ========================================
    FreeBSD 5.1-Current (Was 4.8 Release, upgraded in attempt to find
    problem)
    CPU: Intel Pentium III (927.11-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin =
    "GenuineIntel"
    real memory = 1342111744 (1279 MB)
    fxp0: <Intel 82557/8/9 EtherExpress Pro/100(B) Ethernet>
    da0: <SEAGATE ST318305LC 2203> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
    da0: 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz, offset 63, 16bit)
    da0: 17366MB (35566478 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 2213C)

    DB/File Server: (Dell PowerEdge 2U Server 768MB/RAID5)
    =======================================
    FreeBSD 4.8 Stable
    CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) III CPU family 1266MHz (1263.45-MHz
    686-class CPU)
    real memory = 805240832 (786368K bytes)
    fxp0: <Intel 82557/8/9 EtherExpress Pro/100(B) Ethernet>
    aac0: <Dell PERC 3/Di> mem 0xf0000000-0xf7ffffff irq 2 at device 2.1 on
    pci2
    aac0: i960RX 100MHz, 118MB cache memory, optional battery present
    aacd0: <RAID 5> on aac0
    aacd0: 69425MB (142182912 sectors)

    Development Machine: (Whitebox machine)
    ========================================
    FreeBSD 5.0-Release
    CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+ (1544.67-MHz 686-class CPU)
    real memory = 234815488 (223 MB)
    rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX>
    ad0: 39205MB <Maxtor 6E040L0> [79656/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA133

    Ideas? Could the CPU alone be doing that much towards the difference?
    RAM (DDRvsECC)? I don't have any other AMD machines to use in a control
    group so I can't persue that route.

    I have benchmarks attached below...

    Thanks for any ideas,
    John Straiton
    jks@ clickcom.com
    Clickcom, Inc
    704-365-9970x101

    The benchmarks that show the most difference are these...my notes in
    ()'s:
    ========================================================================
    ====
    #bonnie -s 1 (run on NFS share)
                  -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input--
    --Random--
                  -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block---
    --Seeks---
    Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU
    /sec %CPU
    PROD 1 6364 25.0 9121 4.9 166 0.3 2906 13.5 94108 28.6 398.8
    3.3
                  -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input--
    --Random--
                  -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block---
    --Seeks---
    Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU
    /sec %CPU
    DEV 1 11246 65.3 11259 6.4 6733 4.3 11009 41.9 292571 95.3 5612.2
    28.9

    #ubench
    PROD: (ECC SDRAM)
    Ubench CPU: 25713
    Ubench MEM: 22707
    --------------------
    Ubench AVG: 24210

    DEV: (DDR)
    Ubench CPU: 66048
    Ubench MEM: 57434
    --------------------
    Ubench AVG: 61741

    #netperf (TO DB MACHINE FROM NOTED MACHINE)
    TCP STREAM TEST to DB FROM DEV
    Recv Send Send
    Socket Socket Message Elapsed
    Size Size Size Time Throughput
    bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/sec

     57344 32768 32768 10.01 92.74

    TCP STREAM TEST to DB FROM PROD
    Recv Send Send
    Socket Socket Message Elapsed
    Size Size Size Time Throughput
    bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/sec

     57344 32768 32768 10.00 87.61

    _______________________________________________
    freebsd-performance@freebsd.org mailing list
    http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-performance
    To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-performance-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"

  • Next message: Eric Anderson: "Re: Performance Problems.. Server hardware smoked by $500 box?"

    Relevant Pages

    • Performance Problems.. Server hardware smoked by $500 box?
      ... webserver with a separate db/file server sitting behind it. ... Now granted the development machine has the most Mhz, ... CPU: Intel Pentium III Origin = ... Ubench CPU: 25713 ...
      (freebsd-questions)
    • Re: Dell PowerEdge 2450 & Win2k3 server
      ... The other thing you can do is try to run just one CPU and see if one of the ... Enterprise server sp1. ... I get this error after the windows setup process. ... Tried installing with the PERC and also tried installing using the ...
      (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
    • Re: Chat server : Threading in select call
      ... on the same CPU. ... the server continues to make forward progress on ... For example, in the typical case, the server handles each request as ... any server where there is tight integration between connections (one ...
      (comp.unix.programmer)
    • Re: Tips on Measuring Performance
      ... I ran ubench and got the results below. ... Memory and CPU in the machine used ... Ubench MEM: 69454 ...
      (comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc)