Ultra low throughput on Ultra2

ibtim13 · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 2:49 am Post subject: Ultra low throughput on Ultra2

I have an Ultra2 Creator 3D system.
I've been running gentoo on it for about a year, as well
as on it's predecessor, an Ultra2 creator system for about 3 years.

Right now it's running kernel 2.6.10-gentoo-r6
It's been up (until today) for 87 days, and the last reboot was a
result of defective memory.
(conveniently enough, the slot number of the defective chip showed up in the logs,
unfortunately, because it's an Ultra 2, I lost 256MB of ram for one defective 64MB chip).
The last time it was rebooted before then was the last time I compiled a new kernel for it,
on March 6th 2005.

The machine has the following:
2 x 400Mhz Ultrasparc II processors.
768MB ram (after losing the 256)
2 x 9.1 GB 10000RPM segate scsi drives on the internal ESP scsi controller.
1 x 250GB 7200RPM maxtor ATA-133 drive on a ATA-SCSI-U160 converter.
That drive is on a PTI Qlogic ISP SBUS Ultra Wide Single Ended SCSI controller
and lives in an external enclosure.

I use this machine rather heavily as a server,
mostly for subversion repositories, but also for several wikis, bugzilla,
horde calendar and to do list systems, and several websites, mostly using PHP and MySQL.
I also use it for FTP, and that is where my problem starts.

I transfer many large files back and forth to this machine on a regular basis via ftp.

If the copper gigabit sbus cards weren't so rare and expensive I'd get one.
I used to get close to the theoretical bandwidth of the 100MB ethernet controller
11-12MB/s when transfering to or from any machine on the network to the
250GB external drive, and slightly less when going to the internal drives.

Recently I cannot get above 1MB/s download (from the sparc)
or above 1.9MB/s upload (to the sparc).

I haven't been able to figure this out and it's been really slowing me down.
Does anyone have any idea what might cause this?

I haven't upgraded the kernel since march, so I'm guessing it's not a driver
issue. I'm using vsftpd for ftp, but the exact same thing happens for sftp with ssh2.

The version of vsftpd is 2.0.3-r1.

This doesn't seem to affect apache,
subversion through DAV seems fast enough.

Thanks for any help.
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)

TrAvELAr · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Baltimore, MD

Not sure how your negotiation is occuring. Check this thread:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-362015-highlight-ethtool.html

Perhaps your dropping down to half-duplex after a kernel upgrade. Try following that thread and forcing it to full.

ibtim13 · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 4:47 pm Post subject:

That doesn't seem to be the issue. According to my logs

TrAvELAr · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Baltimore, MD

Gah... Sorry that wasn't it. It was just a thought. Have you tried any other kernels for kicks?

ibtim13 · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 5:27 pm Post subject:

I haven't yet, but as I said, I've been on the same kernel since march, and this
problem is very recent, like since november.
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)

TrAvELAr · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Baltimore, MD

I know this is basic, but sometimes you have to step back and start with the basics. Have you tried a different port on your switch/router? I've seen ports go semi-bad and start dropping packets causing a "slowness" about them. Have you replaced your cable? Are you getting an RF interference near your cable?

I know you said apache/SVN thru DAV seem fine, but perhaps they are still affected.

Sorry for the basicness of the response, but I've seen all of those cause bad connections. Can you log into your switch/router and view the port or the logs? Perhaps it can tell you something more.

ibtim13 · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 6:48 pm Post subject:

That's going to be tricky since the wiring is all in the walls here, but I'll plug it straight into a switch and into my laptop and
see if it makes a difference. Thanks for all the responses.
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)

TrAvELAr · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Baltimore, MD

No problem. Let me know how that works out. If need be, I'll try and come up with a few more possibilities for you.

gust4voz · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 10:16 pm Post subject:

Just take into consideration that scp uses ssh as transport protocol, thus usually encrypts and compresses and that takes up cpu cycles.
So in the sake of getting the most possible stick on every test with a simple protocol such as ftp or http.
_________________
Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

ibtim13 · Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 11:22 pm Post subject:

After much testing and trial I had made absolutely no progress on this issue. Nothing helped. Even plugging directly into the system with a crossover cable didn't do anything different. I just got a new job and have been very busy, so I just put it all back the way it was and decided I'd deal with it later. About two days ago I went to grab something from the machine over the network and, much to my surprise, got full bandwidth. 10.6MBps over a 100Mbit connection. I have no idea, literally none, as to why or what or how. But it works great now despite nothing having changed.
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)