On Oct 8, 2007, at 6:57 AM, Future Media (Luke Siemaszko) wrote:
continually have stability problems with my Panther server. It
seemed fine when new 2-3 years ago, but has gradually degraded.
Earlier this year I thought it was my fault, for testing software on
the server. So I completely rebuilt the server from scratch,
original install discs, all the software updates applied before it
was ever connected to anything. And now I never test anything on
the server. It seemed Ok for a time, but now it's getting worse.
We are only a small office, not doing anything very challenging, and
it really shouldn't be this difficult.
While I have a software background, administering a server is
outside my area of expertise and I have had to learn a lot to get
this set up, I would love to outsource this, but in my neck of the
woods there doesn't seem to be anyone offering the relevant skills.
So I am going to have to sort it out it myself. So I could do with
some help please!
What I have:
G4/733 quicksilver
10.3.9 server
1.5GB RAM (max for a quicksilver)
Hitachi Deskstar 128GB IDE disc for system and archiving
Atto UL4S SCSI card
Maxtor Atlas 10K 70GB disc for user data
Sony AIT2 firewire drive for backup
The system disc only uses 4GB out of a 40GB partition, and the
user disk is 50% free, so there is no disc space issue
What I do with it:
client authentication
network home directories
mail server
file serving
firewall
web serving - but there is currently no load on this - it is
almost never accessed
Runs the following server apps
filemaker 8
moneyworks
group organizer
Plus retrospect 6
Typically there will be 4 users logged in, using the above apps.
Never more than 6 users. So just that plus basic file serving.
Share points are 1 for user home dirs, plus 2 for user data.
First problem. A couple of months after I set the server up it
started getting terminally slow- within a couple of minutes of being
restarted, it would be so slow that users could not log on. Using
Activity Monitor I discovered that this was due to AFP. Sharing
with NFS rather than AFP seemed to sure this particular problem.
Hmmm... On early 10.4 I could see this, but on 10.3 the AFP server is
pretty good. What did the disk IO look like when this happened?
Now it behaves most of the time - but every few days, and
increasingly often, it will slow to a crawl. Mail.app and
Moneyworks take ages to get data from the server, and login process
either becomes incredibly slow or times out. Rebooting the server
seems to cure it - until it happens again in a few days.
Take a look at the processes when it is slow and see what is going on.
What is consuming the CPU? What does the disk IO look like at the time?
