faster new machine serves images slower than old machine?

sneakyimp · 11-01-2007, 02:26 AM

I have a live site, let's call it mydomain.com. The site has been up for 46 days and served up about 1.5 million page views last month which means about 8 million hits.

I'm setting up a new server with a faster CPU (which happens to be dual-core), more RAM, 3 hard drives instead of one, and a 100 Mb/s network interface instead of 10Mb/s.

I've copied my site code over to the new machine which I can access by visiting server2.mydomain.com.

For some reason, the pages seem to render more slowly on the new machine even though it should be faster. In particular, the new machine appears to load images more slowly. Why might this be?? I can clear the cache in my browser, visit the same page on both sites and the live machine (a 2ghz celeron) appears to serve the images more quickly than the hot new box (2.2ghz dual-core AMD chip). Might this be due to some DNS weirdness as in the the old machine is a more widely visited IP address than the new machine? Is there some way to benchmark this sort of thing so I can bring a quantitative argument to my hosting provider about it?

selva146 · 11-01-2007, 03:01 AM

Hi,
if you doubt about DNS, then try access your site by ip address. then see the difference

strick1226 · 11-01-2007, 12:23 PM

As crazy at it sounds, you might want to check the duplex setting of the new server's NIC. I've seen some at 1000/half and it is PAINFUL to use those boxes.

Beyond that, I think Selva146's suggestion on bypassing DNS by using the direct IP address is a great idea.

sneakyimp · 11-01-2007, 04:28 PM

I used tracert and apparently the old server has 29 hops where the new one has only 18. I'm guessing the route packets take is not permanent and may improve with time as the new server becomes more popular?

How might I check the duplex setting on the new server? It's on the east coast (i'm in cali). Is there a CLI command?

complich8 · 11-01-2007, 06:00 PM

duplex settings: check the output of "ethtool eth0"

you can try forcing full-duplex with ethtool, as well.

I doubt it's a forward dns issue. You might be having reverse dns lookup issues though -- eg for apache logging. Check your httpd logs and config.

Also, consider looking at your httpd config anyway. There's a lot of settings in there that can substantially affect performance...