unloaded server is very very slow
I am helping a friend set up a new server, he has chosen a dual 2.4gig xeon 2 gig ram and dual scsi hard drives with Cpanel and RedHat Enterprise 3 i686
the second drive is yet to be partitioned
My concern is this.
While setting up some accounts using Cpanel I thought the server was extremely slow, considering there is no working websites on it. setting up one account would take 3-4 or more minutes
I ssh'd in and ran top. according to top no process is consuming any real cpu time yet the free% often drops to zero (4 virtual processors, 2 real)
I have also noted that the iowait is often very high > 50%. So I assume the delay is caused by disk accesses
What I can't work out is whats causing these disk accesses, there is nothing on the server. just the basic configuration.
I also noted that when logging in to SSH, it is slow to respond.
Can any one give me some hints as to why this server is performing like a dead dog being kicked?
Surely the second unpartitioned drive is not causing it.
Below is the result of top while doing nothing more than changing pages in cpanel, even that drove it to 100% utilisation.
Is it a problem with cpanel?
My friend is moving to ev1 servers at my suggestion because his current server can't cope. If I can't fix this its going to be very embarrassing for me! (not to mention costly)
Code:
04:28:16 up 12 days, 10:05, 1 user, load average: 0.46, 0.19, 0.47
88 processes: 87 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle
total 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 90.5% 9.4%
cpu00 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 81.2% 18.7%
cpu01 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 81.1% 18.8%
cpu02 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% 0.0%
cpu03 0.0% 0.0% 0.1% 0.0% 0.0% 99.8% 0.0%
Mem: 2055392k av, 2030824k used, 24568k free, 0k shrd, 178324k buff
792104k actv, 781428k in_d, 33004k in_c
Swap: 2048276k av, 0k used, 2048276k free 1535916k cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
1 root 15 0 452 452 396 S 0.0 0.0 0:13 0 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 migration/0
3 root RT 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 migration/1
4 root RT 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 2 migration/2
5 root RT 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 3 migration/3
6 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 2 keventd
7 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 ksoftirqd/0
8 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 ksoftirqd/1
9 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 2 ksoftirqd/2
10 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 3 ksoftirqd/3
13 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 bdflush
11 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:07 3 kswapd
12 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 1:06 0 kscand
14 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:10 0 kupdated
15 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 mdrecoveryd
25 root 15 0 0 0 0 DW 0.0 0.0 0:43 0 kjournald
80 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 2 khubd
791 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kjournald
792 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 kjournald
1264 root 15 0 452 452 388 S 0.0 0.0 0:48 1 irqbalance
1274 root 15 0 400 400 344 S 0.0 0.0 0:02 2 mdadm
1498 root 22 0 428 428 376 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 mingetty
1499 root 22 0 428 428 376 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mingetty
1500 root 22 0 428 428 376 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 3 mingetty
1501 root 22 0 428 428 376 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 3 mingetty
1502 root 22 0 428 428 376 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mingetty
1503 root 22 0 428 428 376 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 2 mingetty
1504 root 21 0 468 468 412 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 2 agetty
11722 root 16 0 1564 1564 1316 S 0.0 0.0 0:14 1 sshd
14258 root 15 0 636 636 548 S 0.0 0.0 0:01 2 crond
15297 root 25 0 1044 1044 904 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 1 mysqld_safe
