Linode.com Forum

[hallow]

The first couple of days on Xen, everything was bliss. It was fast. But now it's so slow... It takes a frustratingly long time just to get a password prompt via ssh, and the once I do log in, the motd displays, but again it takes forever for the command line to display. I'm not even doing anything that heavy, just lighttpd + php.

If I reboot, it becomes more responsive for a short period of time, but 20-30min in it gets down right glacial again.

I don't know if the box is overburned with too many users, or if it's Xen, or some configuration issue. But it's been unreliable and pretty much unusable for the past week.

[caker]

Mind helping me out a little? Can you paste the output of "cat /proc/swaps" and "vmstat 1 10"?

-Chris

[hallow]

/proc/swaps is empty

Code:
root@webmages:~ # cat /proc/swaps
root@webmages:~ #


Code:
root@webmages:~ # vmstat 1 10
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 0  0      0   3864   8376  89680    0    0     0     0    1     2  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8376  89680    0    0     0     0    6     2  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8376  89680    0    0     0     0    9    10  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8376  89680    0    0     0     0    5     4  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8376  89680    0    0     0     0    5    10  0  0 100  0
 0  1      0   3864   8384  89740    0    0     0    28    5     7  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8384  89740    0    0     0     0    7    10  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8384  89740    0    0     0     0    3     4  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8384  89740    0    0     0     0    6    10  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0   3864   8384  89740    0    0     0     0    6     8  0  0 100  0


Top reports:
Code:
top - 21:07:40 up 2 days, 11:23,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks:  61 total,   1 running,  60 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    123072k total,   119292k used,     3780k free,     8412k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    89712k cached


I did just notice that my swap wasn't actually enabled -- I created a new swap partition when I moved over, and it's on a different device (hda4 instead of hda2). It would make sense if that was part of the problem..

[hallow]

That was it! No swap was the problem. It couldn't page out what wasn't actively being used.

Chalk it up to another case of user error.

[hallow]

hrm... actually it fixed it momentarily.
I'm stuck after the motd again with not command prompt. Even though it uses more RAM I think I might try switching back from dropbear to openssh

[caker]

It would help if you could catch me in the #linode-xenbeta channel next time you experience slowness. That way, I can try a few things and see if they affect the interactivity you're experiencing.

http://www.linode.com/irc/

Thanks,
-Chris