Internet production server

[lastgreatone]

I have been a unix systems administrator for the past 3 years. I am the primary administrator responsible for the optimal performance of an internet L-class server which has 512Mb of RAM and 1 CPU(360 MHz).

The databases hosted on this L1000 are less than 1Gb in size. Httpd requests are handled by a K420 across the firewall which then retrieves data from the L1000.

Performance has been reported as being slow on the L1000 and I have been monitoring and patching whatever daemons appear to create memory overflows, ie mib2agt.

The dba runs xoffice(GroupWise), Wordperfect, Netscape and occasionally xomni on the L1000. I want to remove these applications to ensure all cpu cycles are dedicated to the production server.

The dba argues with me that the above mentioned applications do not have an impact on the performance of the server and that the production server is his home base.

Am I being overly pro-active? I welcome any feedback.

TIA

[John Bolene]

That system does seem to be a bit undersized to be running all it is running.

I would add another 512 meg memory and another processor depending on how many users are on at any one time.

To see what is taking the cpu, try using top for at least a few minutes and you might want to watch it for an hour during the busy part of the day. If you have glance, that is a much better product to use.

Give us more stats to go on, and the answers will be better also.

[lastgreatone]

Well, that's the point, because of the low resources we should minimize the impact. Besides these applications can be run from any other server on our LAN, why the production server, is what I ask.

In general, these applications take approximately 5% of the cpu, but I did notice Netscape going rogue occasionally and I had to kill the session.

[lastgreatone]

Here are the specs:

L1000, 512Mb RAM, 1 360Mhz cpu, 64 bit o.s.
Use: Oracle database production server
Users: 15
Apps: xoffice(GW5), WP7, Netscape, OmnibackII, ArcInfo, SDE

[Christopher Caldwell · Accepted solution]

As a matter of practice, I don't run anything but the database on the database server. Oracle licenses are expensive; I want to give the database all of the "opportunity" to run that is possible.

Regardless of the availability of CPU cycles, the default HP-UX scheduler will tend to penalize applications that run for longer periods of time and that take a relatively higher percent of CPU cycles. Therfore I don't want anything to compete with the database, especially things that seem to be lightweight, since by default, the scheduler will give these transient, lightweight apps a more generous look at the CPU.

Given that CPU cycles are available, and that Oracle (from a process standpoint) doesn't seem to be getting killed by the scheduler, I'd
1) nail tables in memory
2) run a database diagnostic tool (like Quest's SQLab) to see what's going on with the database. We find that perfomance problems generally require database tunes much more often than hardware upgrades
3) check the firewall for a potential bottleneck. Since the DB is behind a firewall, make sure to compare SQL performance locally (on the database server) to performance through the firewall.