slow performance of the server

[Horia Chirculescu]

>Can it be a problem with device drivers??

This will be a problem solved with OS upgrade.
Installing/compiling new drivers on the same OS would require updating some of the system libraries and you will only loose time.

You can also try to install a newer kernel.

But again, my first choice would be to upgrade the OS.

Horia.

[Sunny Jaisinghani]

unfortunately i don't have a support contract with Red Hat.
So getting a new kernel would be difficult.

The current level is 2.4.21-9.ELsmp

Is there any other source from where i can get kernel update? which i can rely on

[Horia Chirculescu]

According to http://www.kernel.org/,
the latest 2.4 version is 2.4.37.9.

You could try a

yum update kernel

Alternatively, if you have installed the development tools you could install the source and compile it by yourself as you like. In this case you would keep only what you would need in your system.

Horia.

[MarkSeger · Accepted solution]

whenever I'm having performance issues my very first thing to do is run collectl either as a daemon on in another window and watch what's going on during your times of trouble to try and pin down which resource(s) you're being starved on. Is it disk? cpu? network? memory? With collectl you can watch all 4 while you're doing your query, though since by default (to limit the display to 80 columns) it only shows cpu, disk and network. To see all 4, just add memory to the display (if it will fit) by running the command:

collectl -s+m

Only after you determine WHICH resource is having issues can you take the next step of trying to fix the problem.

-mark

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

"HDD Data tx rate" - did you test this from your application or just by some copy command?

As masny others, I suggest you to upgrade your OS. You can either upgrade to RHEL/CENTOS 5 or upgrade RHEL3 to the latest update level using CENTOS repositories.
I don't think that hardware is a problem in this case.