On 12/21/2011 12:00 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 12/21/2011 8:45, Tom Austin wrote:
>> The main problem is not a small delay in getting a file - 10-15
>> seconds can
>> happen from time to time. But 5+ minutes is pretty bad.
>
> On a gigabit network, that sounds like a long time to load a 5M file.
>

Agreed, but the occasional 'glitch' of 10-15 seconds is acceptable.

> Do you do a lot of updates on the Linux server, like creating and
> deleting thousands of files at a time? It's possible that the Linux
> server is just locking up flushing its buffers if it has a lot of RAM.
> Sadly, I don't know any sort of monitor that would actually tell you
> what's going on inside the kernel of a Linux machine. (Anyone know what
> the equivalent of Performance Monitor on Linux is?) If your file server
> has RAID, maybe there's a bad spot on one of the disks and it retries a
> while before falling over to the other disk? Maybe check through syslog
> records to see?
>

No updates, but a lot of large (5 MB) image files are being transferred 
to and around the file system.

It is 32 bit - so only 4GB of physical ram with some extra swap just in 
case.

It does have RAID - OS is RAID 1 on the software level, file drives are 
RAID 1 on a 3Ware controller 2 mirrored sets as a logical volume.

> Check the domain server's event logs around the time of a problem, and
> see if it's an authorization problem or something, where maybe you're
> waiting for a new kerberos key to access the remote file and the domain
> server is slow giving it out for some reason?
>

That could be a very real possibility - and would bring our crappy 
Windows domain server into question - like we want it to be :-)

This is good food for thought.  I'll set up some tests that might help 
flush some of this out.

Thanks

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