Hi Guys,

I'm having a very strange serious network problem:

I have an apache webserver running redhat as3 serving http pages.

I have clients running windows and ie6.

The pages are serving up at 1/2kb per second at best, taking 10-15 seconds to load one page on the local lan.

The network cards are 1gbps and so are the switches and every protocol can transfer up to 20mbs per second between machines.

I plug in my laptop which also connects at 1gbps and the slowness occurs.
I plug in my laptop via crossover to the server bypassing the switch and the slowness occurs.
I plug in someone elses laptop and the slowness occurs.
I plug in an extra network card into the server, connect via crossover or switch and the slowness occurs
I have one server on which the pages load instantaneously, connected on the same network and the same speed as the other servers.


I'm thinking maybe there's something wrong with the config of the network stack on the server serving the pages.

The server which doesn't have the problem accessing the webserver maybe has a driver which can cope with the problem or something??

Any help GREATLY appreciated.


Tony

When slowness like that occurs, it's typically hard drives. As in they are replicating errors across a RAID 1.

Reboot the webserver, then type "dmesg" and "ps aux" and paste the output here. You don't seem like you're clueless, so this should be fixed quite quickly.

do the speeds, duplex, etc., on the NIC cards match the port settings on the switch? most switches set at AUTO SPEED and AUTO NEG will work better for gig speeds

do a traceroute, or better yet, an mtr to the www server from the same subnet and see where the hangup is

also, are you running plain cat5? you need enhanced cat5 or cat6 for full-blown gig speed (but it shouldnt really make much diff on your local lan)

Along those lines, it could also just be a bad nic spewing out packets. EMF happens.

Many many thanks guys - this was a real strange one. Here's the problem and the solution:

It occurred that the initial connection to the server is slow for all protocols, but once established everything is fine. As http is connectionless, every gif and web page component is a separate connection to the server which has to be initialised. Ethereal was showing delays and nothing else at fault so I created an ssh tunnel to the box. I tunneled the http pages down it and hey presto everything worked perfectly as the connection was already established to the server. I checked the dns config and it seems the dns was still pointing to an incorrect dns server. I created a dns server in the network and everything is now fine! The reason behind the other server having no problems was that the webserver had it in it's hosts file so didn't need to do a reverse dns lookup.

Again thanks for the responses.

Tony

"You don't seem like you're clueless, so this should be fixed quite quickly."

I stand corrected. :/