Server Slowdowns

Started by Marguerite, May 26, 2011, 08:22:50 PM

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Chelemar

QuoteFROM `elliquiy_smf`.smf_themes

Is this proof that smirfs control the E.?

Starlequin

Oh no, what a smurfy thought!
You live for the fight when it's all that you've got.

Vekseid

Quote from: Chelemar on May 27, 2011, 11:38:17 PM
Is this proof that smirfs control the E.?

SMF stands for Simple Machines Forum, which is what we run : )

Star Safyre

R.I.P. Mr. You Posted Here.  Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.

/salute
My heaven is to be with him always.
|/| O/O's / Plots / tumblr / A/A's |/|
And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones

HockeyGod

I know that everyone has universally said to take away the smiley face and it's gone, so this may not sway the argument, but I used it EVERY time I'm in E. I use it especially in the introduction board - this allows me to see which thread I've posted an intro question into. It appears that now I have to click in every thread to see if I posted.

So...will it ever come back?

Vekseid

Quote from: alxnjsh on May 28, 2011, 09:28:36 AM
I know that everyone has universally said to take away the smiley face and it's gone, so this may not sway the argument, but I used it EVERY time I'm in E. I use it especially in the introduction board - this allows me to see which thread I've posted an intro question into. It appears that now I have to click in every thread to see if I posted.

So...will it ever come back?

It's not like the you-posted-here notification icons are causing the problem, far from it. They're just not helping when it is a problem.

We are basically out of RAM. I've disabled some useless things on the server side and tightened belts on BMR and LR. It just seems incredulous to me that I'd have to go beg for another $1,500 for more server upgrades when we're not actually physically out of memory yet. Just nearly so.

Supposedly, setting swappiness to 0 like I have should mean that applications don't get swapped to disk. But they were getting swapped to disk anyway, even though they could almost all fit in RAM and certainly could now. After tightening things Linux is behaving better, though. Lots of swap in and no swap out.

I'll see if the load spikes are gone and if so I can re-enable the icons for now.

Vekseid

Tuned the database a bit, looks like we might be able to use a few hundred megabytes more efficiently.

Still will leave Linux flubbing its lips about what to do with half a gig but still an improvement. If things run well this evening I'll re-enable the icons. May also move Sphinx to the backup/dns/mumble server to free up some more RAM and prevent the reindexing slowdowns.

Starlequin

*sigh* There was a time I actually knew what all that meant.  :-(
* Starlequin misses being smart.
You live for the fight when it's all that you've got.

Vekseid

Linux has a general measurement of server load called, creatively, 'load'. It's a numeric value that tells you how many processes are waiting to run at once. Elliquiy's server can handle a load of up to 4 without issue, because it has four drives and four cpu cores. So it can do four things at once, generally.

Swap is 'virtual ram' - it's disk space being used as memory, only roughly about a million times slower. That isn't an exaggeration, it really is a million times slower. This means when the virtual memory of something that is actively being used gets used, the OS starts swapping it in and out of memory, called thrashing. Which is what Elliquiy was doing the slowdowns, but, it shouldn't have been - there was a gig and a half of RAM left free. In Linux, you control how aggressively the system swaps out applications with the swappiness parameter. 0 means it won't swap until necessary (in theory), keeping applications in RAM, 100 means it will swap everything it can, saving ram for the disk cache.

Since Elliquiy isn't a fileserver, we want to keep applications in memory. And that wasn't happening, even at zero. v. frustrating.

Sphinx is the search engine for Elliquiy and Blue Moon. It makes an index of every single post on the site, and allows some pretty advanced features, though we only take advantage of a few of them.

* Vekseid is happy to explain things, though. : )

Nadir


Starlequin

Ah, knowledge nuggets. I have missed thy flavor. Why couldn't we have had a teacher like you during our Comp.Prog.Tech. classes instead of those lifeless drones who sent us to read chapters 4-17 every week?

@Atreyu: No, don't run! You'll never make it! Aiiee!
You live for the fight when it's all that you've got.

Vekseid

As you can see I've reenabled the icons.


root@trancephalon:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         12038      11800        237          0        161       1493
-/+ buffers/cache:      10146       1891
Swap:         4102        334       3767


Much nicer looking.

Numbers are in megabytes - e.g. we have twelve gigabytes of ram and ~250 megabytes free.

Kye

Huzzah! Thank you Veks! While I don't understand all the numbers I'm thrilled to have the icons back.

HockeyGod

Yes, I love the smileys...thanks!

Star Safyre

Yay, Mr. You Posted Here lives again!   XD

Boo, the blue star is gone.   :'(
My heaven is to be with him always.
|/| O/O's / Plots / tumblr / A/A's |/|
And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones

Vekseid

Oh shoot. Stupid mod overwrote it. Where was that star again? >_>

Star Safyre

* Star Safyre raises her hand!

Oh, you meant the graphic.   :-[
My heaven is to be with him always.
|/| O/O's / Plots / tumblr / A/A's |/|
And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones

Marguerite

Another slow down again?
*R.R*A.A*O.O*Wiki*Bordello*Whip and Apple*
You Keep On Crying, Baby, I'll Bleed You Dry
Mar Is Currently: Taking On Threads
Check My Absence Thread For Updates, Thank You

Saerrael

I have the same thing, right now.

Vekseid


Marguerite

For a second, I thought we used up all of the space again.

-Smiles-

*R.R*A.A*O.O*Wiki*Bordello*Whip and Apple*
You Keep On Crying, Baby, I'll Bleed You Dry
Mar Is Currently: Taking On Threads
Check My Absence Thread For Updates, Thank You

Vekseid

Quote from: Marguerite on June 08, 2011, 11:11:17 PM
For a second, I thought we used up all of the space again.

-Smiles-

Well that is basically what happened. I was doing some maintenance on the server and apparently I can't run the forums and do that at the same time : /

Marguerite

Damn and it has been only a week since the last server slowdowns.
*R.R*A.A*O.O*Wiki*Bordello*Whip and Apple*
You Keep On Crying, Baby, I'll Bleed You Dry
Mar Is Currently: Taking On Threads
Check My Absence Thread For Updates, Thank You