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Questions tagged [performance]

Questions about server hardware and software performance, or network performance.

3181 questions
154
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13 answers

Are networks now faster than disks?

This is a software design question I used to work on the following rule for speed cache memory > memory > disk > network With each step being 5-10 times the previous step (e.g. cache memory is 10 times faster than main memory). Now, it seems that…
pm100
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133
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4 answers

FreeBSD performance tuning: Sysctl parameter, loader.conf, kernel

I wanted to share knowledge of tuning FreeBSD via sysctl.conf / loader.conf / KENCONF / etc. It was initially based on Igor Sysoev's (author of nginx) presentation about FreeBSD tuning up to 100,000-200,000 active connections. Newer versions of…
SaveTheRbtz
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122
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28 answers

How to copy a large number of files quickly between two servers

I need to transfer a huge amount of mp3s between two serves (Ubuntu). By huge I mean about a million files which are on average 300K. I tried with scp but it would have taken about a week. (about 500 KB/s) If I transfer a single file by HTTP, I get…
nicudotro
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109
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8 answers

How can a single disk in a hardware SATA RAID-10 array bring the entire array to a screeching halt?

Prelude: I'm a code-monkey that's increasingly taken on SysAdmin duties for my small company. My code is our product, and increasingly we provide the same app as SaaS. About 18 months ago I moved our servers from a premium hosting centric vendor to…
Stu Thompson
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104
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8 answers

What limits the maximum number of connections on a Linux server?

What kernel parameter or other settings control the maximum number of TCP sockets that can be open on a Linux server? What are the tradeoffs of allowing more connections? I noticed while load testing an Apache server with ab that it's pretty easy to…
Ben Williams
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102
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6 answers

High load average, low CPU usage - why?

We're seeing huge performance problems on a web application and we're trying to find the bottleneck. I am not a sysadmin so there is some stuff I don't quite get. Some basic investigation shows the CPU to be idle, lots of memory to be available,…
Spiff
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89
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4 answers

Why is TCP accept() performance so bad under Xen?

The rate at which my server can accept() new incoming TCP connections is really bad under Xen. The same test on bare metal hardware shows 3-5x speed ups. How come this is so bad under Xen? Can you tweak Xen to improve performance for new TCP…
cgbystrom
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86
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6 answers

Software vs hardware RAID performance and cache usage

I've been reading a lot on RAID controllers/setups and one thing that comes up a lot is how hardware controllers without cache offer the same performance as software RAID. Is this really the case? I always thought that hardware RAID cards would…
ItsJustMe
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64
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11 answers

What can cause slow ssh session?

I ssh on remote host but terminal performance is poor. Symbols I am typing are not shown immediately, but with some delay. Sometimes two symbols are shown at one time after delay.
lexsys
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62
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10 answers

How to [politely?] tell software vendor they don't know what they're talking about

Not a technical question, but a valid one nonetheless. Scenario: HP ProLiant DL380 Gen 8 with 2 x 8-core Xeon E5-2667 CPUs and 256GB RAM running ESXi 5.5. Eight VMs for a given vendor's system. Four VMs for test, four VMs for production. The four…
Simon Catlin
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60
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12 answers

Is virtual machine slower than the underlying physical machine?

This question is quite general, but most specifically I'm interested in knowing if virtual machine running Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud will be any slower than the same physical machine without any virtualization. How much (1%, 5%, 10%)? Did anyone…
Michal Illich
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59
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2 answers

Can rsync display current average speed?

When I'm transferring large quantities of data using rsync, it would be helpful if I could have the average speed up until now at a glance, rather than a bunch of different speeds for each file.
Fela Maslen
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56
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4 answers

Why is my rsync so slow?

My Laptop and my workstation are both connected to a Gigabit Switch. Both are running Linux. But when I copy files with rsync, it performs badly. I get about 22 MB/s. Shouldn't I theoretically get about 125 MB/s? What is the limiting factor…
iblue
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53
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4 answers

How can I find out what is causing interrupts on Windows?

Occasionally I come across servers (Windows 2003 and 2008) with high processor % interrupt time. Is there a way to see what program or device is causing the interrupts?
jlupolt
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52
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7 answers

Process runs slower as a scheduled task than it does interactively

I have a scheduled task which is very CPU- and IO-intensive, and takes about four hours to run (building source code, if you're curious). The task is a Powershell script which spawns various sub-processes to do its work. When I run the same process…
Charlie
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