Hi,

I manage (for heritage purposes, not because I want to) a CentOS-based billing router for a resort; the router manages a network of 40 guest rooms and conference rooms, managing client connections and monitoring usage and billing for it. The customer has recently complained about excessive slowness in response when managing the accounts on the system via a web interface (apache/php/pgsql). I don't see much unusual activity via top.

The router was originally designed in the days before ubiquitous smart-phones and tablets, and it made me wonder about DHCP activity: what I found is lots of current DHCP leases (see the attached file)dhcpd.leases.txt; I also check var/log/messages, which was overflowing with DHCP traffic (see the attached file)dhcp_traffic.txt.tar.gz.txt.

I'm wondering whether this sort of DHCP traffic is normal in a such an environment, if it could be the cause of the perceived slowness, and - most important, what to do about it?

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Regards,
Edwin Humphries

1800 DHCP requests in a week is not going to have a noticeable effect on your server. The increased number of mobile devices causes a lot of extra DHCP logging on all of our servers. Take a look in /var/log/httpd/ at the access and especially the error log. Also if there is a backend database, check its logging.