more on bogged down server

[Harold Hallikainen]

> On Wed, April 12, 2006 12:37 pm, Rick Stevens said:
>> On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 08:20 -0700, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 15:53 -0700, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>>> >>> >
>>> I REALLY appreciate all the help on this list!
>
> Me too. Even when I haven't asked for it and something comes across . . .
>
>>
>> Check with your ISP to see if they changed the polling intervals or
>> any other parameter having to do with your transmission pipe.  Sometimes
>> they add a lot of new clients onto your ring, so they shorten your
>> poll time to accommodate the new users.  My ISP did that to me on my
>> cable modem and I raised holy hell with them.  My poll period was down
>> to 5-10mS!  Ridiculous!  I told them I wasn't paying $40 a month for
>> farking 9600-baud dialup speeds.
>
> Okay, so how do I tell if that's my problem? My ISP changed our DSL link
> to
> a different piece of hardware and the speed went from 6896 to 640k, the
> Qwest default. They've fixed that, but it still appears that my downloads,
> though much faster, are still not what they were before the move, even
> though the older equipment only allowed me to train at 6896 instead of
> 7168,
> which is what I'm trained at now.
>
> Karl


Still learning how all this stuff works (thanks especially to the list).
Communications speeds still seem ok (my DSL is 6M down and something less
up). My server just seems to be bogging down. If communications were slow,
I guess a lot of httpd processes would start to slowly send the data out,
or is there a buffer somewhere that can handle that more efficiently? If
we were I/O bound, it doesn't seem like that'd result in a large cpu load.

Looking at top, even if there is just one instance of httpd, it will go to
100% CPU, or very close to that. I'm assuming it's SUPPOSED to do that,
just not for very long. When there are lots of instances of httpd, the
%CPU in top for each drops, but they add up to near 100%, and the total
%cpu is close to 100%. But, I guess that's ok. If the load were exactly
100%, the load average would show up as 1.00, right?

Now, it's running about 20. sendmail stopped accepting connections at 12.
As mentioned yesterday, I've added robots.txt and told the search engines
to not search the directory with the huge pdfs (which is where I'm
thinking most of the traffic is coming from). I've also put the
crawl-delay in robots.txt at 60 seconds to avoid those once a second
requests. But, stuff is still piling up (they may not have read robots.txt
yet).

I'm running version 2.0.something of httpd that ships with FC4. I see
there's now version 2.2 available. It's supposed to handle large files
better, among other things. I guess I'll give that a try. Others have
suggested more config file changes (getting rid of mod-perl, etc.) to make
httpd more efficient.

I'll keep working on it. Meanwhile, off to restart httpd so I can get mail
again...

Harold

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