Performance Issue

[kunjuttan]

Hi all,

I need your help very badly.Our application team is telling the server performance is very poor and slow.What should I do for checking the same.

Its a Superdome server.OS is HP-UX1131

[sarfaraj ahmad]

hi,
first listen the problem properly and check exactly what problem they are facing.
for performance issue there is so many things involved like CPU, Memory, disk I/O, DB, Application etc.

so better please understand the issue and if possible also compare with normal situation & gather those data.

after this we can proceed for further analysis.

[Shibin_2]

Use glance to watch, your CPU, Memory utilization. Use, top, swapinfo, vmstat commands to find virtual memory and swap utilization.

[Ishwar_1]

check memory, cpu, disk performance, kernel usage, zombie process, uptime and syslog for some error

[Dennis Handly]

>Our application team is telling the server performance is very poor and slow.

What does top show? How many CPUs do you have?
How much RAM/swap?
swapinfo -tam

>It's a Superdome server.

What exact model?

[Alzhy]

Please furnish captures of :

glance
glance -m
sar 5 5
sar -d 5 5
top (if you do not have glance)

when issue is happening.

We should then be able to guide you what areas to look at to address your "performance" issue.

[kunjuttan]

hi thanks....
i dont have glance installed in our box...
Its Superdome-2 server..

[Dennis Handly]

>It's Superdome-2 server.

What exact model? Use the model command.

>Ishwar: zombie process

These shouldn't have any effect on performance.

[Bill Hassell]

Generally, the system is performing at full speed, but application and database people think that the system administrator can set the kernel parameter GOFAST=1 and everything will be fine. The reality is that their app and database work OK but are very badly configured, causing unnecessary disk I/O and/or massive use of RAM which can cause swapping.

Another question is: How do they know that the server is running slow? Did it run faster in the past? If so, what was changed? If it has always run slow, what does the application and/or database vendor recommend to improve performance?

The following script shows my point:

while :
do :
done

3 lines and now CPU usage is 100% for this script. Is it running correctly? Yes. Is it doing anything useful? No. How do I reduce the CPU usage? Ans: add a sleep command:

while :
do :
sleep 1
done

Now the program consumes no meaningful amount of CPU time. And it still does nothing useful.

So the question to the application/database designers would be: Is your app/DB designed for efficiency, and what do your app/DB tools tell you about performance? You (the system administrator) could run sar -d and find huge amounts of I/O to a particular disk only to find that the DBA is reading the database serially. Does it work? Yes. Is it efficient? No.

[Alzhy]

Wow.. SuperDome-2 !
The 'Dome in a C7000 Chassis?

Are you running a DB, Web-Tier or a mixed workload?

Please give as a hint of how your server is performing:

sar 5 5
sar -d 5 5
vmstat 5 5
swapinfo -atm
top

Also, do you have HyperThreading enabled in case your workload can benefit from it?