Hello folks,
currently, I am having a little problem with my local net here.
In short, there is a Debian Stable (Pentium III 1GHz, 256mb RAM) server providing FTP, SSH, AUTH, POP3 and SMTP over Spamassassin to both the local net and the outside world, and DHCP, DNS and time to the local net. Also, he updates two dynamic hostnames every few minutes if necessary. He is connected to the net over a Debian Stable router (Pentium II 233mhz, 64mb RAM) running an iptables firewall and NAT / port forwards through the same.
The connection is Telekom DSL2000, a German ADSL line providing 2048kbit downstream and 128kbit upstream. There are no constant speed breakers such as eMule or similiar running.
They both are serving a net of 4 clients. Not necessary to put up such a system for that, I know, but I will soon begin my university IT studies and, although my direction is different, I want to learn the basics about networking while I am still at home.
Well, having said that, as far as the system itself is concerned in a technical way, everything runs fine. Everything is updated constantly and so far I have not run into problems. But there comes the user, which is me among others, and complains about the speed.
At some times, an address would take up to 10 seconds to resolve, and common webpages (Sourceforge or even Google, for instance) take up to 20 seconds to load. Even text mail takes 30 seconds to send, as every command the server sends to the smarthost takes some 5 seconds to be acked. This is becoming worse and worse since I set up the system, which was in the beginning of August, and starts to suck.
This is quite strange, as both the servar and the router are around 2% constant CPU usage and don't do any swapping. IOW, they don't have much to do. The only exception is a mail arriving, Spamassassin takes heaps of memory on the server.
From what I see, downloading lots of small files (like images) and sending lots of requests to servers is what makes the speed worst; I can get 256kbps downloads without a problem on a fast FTP server, but looking at the networking chart of my gkrellm, when HTTP or similiar low-data protocols are concerned, the speed goes up to maybe 100kbps for thenths of seconds, and goes back to zero for maybe half a second or one. Of course, performance sucks this way, especially if researching for school, I am very slow and frustrated quickly.
Unfortunatley, there are barely any error messages in my logs, which means I cannot do any adequate googleing. Tried some, but the results are so varied that I can't use any of them.
Hope the gurus here can maybe help me, as far as this is possible from such a short description. Maybe, a kind of benchmark would help, or even a "tuning guide" for a local net
Thanks in advance,
David
