server slowdown
 

Hi everyone, I need a bit of help with my server.

I'm running a SLES 10.1 server on my home network.

On it I run apache to maintain a simple website, squid to help me get around my schools web filter, vsftp so my friends and I can store files on it, and icecast for broadcasting my music over the net for wherever I happen to be.

Now my probelm is, after having it on for 2 or 3 hours my network gets very very slow. It is fine during that 2 to 3 hour period, but after that the speed on any other computer is unbearable. I have looked through the log files and I know that nobody else is accessing it but me.

So does anyone have an ideas? what can cause a server to run fine on a network for a few hours then have it slow down to a snails pace?

I know for a fact that its my server btw because when I turn it off the speed of my network shoots up instantly.

thanks in advance for the help :)

Does the server itself slow down? Is it swapping?

Or is it just the network that slows down without their being any slowdown locally on the server machine (which would be mysterious...)?

It is the network itself that slows down, for every computer on the network the internet becomes practically unusable. I was monitoring the system resources last night and when the network started to slow down again I noticed no major changes. Percent of CPU useage was at about 12% and RAM was at about 20% so there was no swaping (the hardware is fairly powerful for what I use it for, when I built it I knew it was overkill). The network activity also remained the same as it was before the slowdown, about 120kbs sending.

what kind of slowness?
1. is it a slow access on the server from outside
2. slow access from server to outside
3. slowness of applications installed

for 1, you can ask somebody to do a traceroute and ping to your server, maybe there are bottlenecks on the routes, likewise for no. 2

for no. 3, you can check if there utilization is high using top d 1.

from there you can assess the next step.

hope this helps.

Use mtr command to find out any packet loss if you have during that time.