Operating system?

 

CPU and Ram look good….

 

Iostat?

 

Hi,

 

Where is your basic fault finding data?

 

We run a database backend for spam control and find that cleaning up / indexing the database has dramatic effects….like after 6 months our Dell 6850 is screwed….clean it up and its disk i/o is 2% again….but this shows up under iostat….using mrtg you can see the graph climbing steadily over the months…..

 

A pair of SATA disks (I assume raid 1) is not very fast (on board raid?...shudder…)….also these are SATA, SATA sucks for random i/o and guess what you have a database doing random i/o……..

 

In terms of code, yes it is often the code at fault. Somehow developers who have written sucky code expect sys admins to spend serious time and money on hardware compensating for their bad code….it does not work.

 

This could be the hard thing to prove….ie….is your disk i/o inadequate or is their code so bad its causing the i/o!

 

If its disk i/o……

 

Generally, you are going to be spending most of your time reading from disk….so you need to be optimising for reads….raid5 is ideal but testing will prove this….LDAP can be distributed over disk sets…so would 4 disks in two raid1s out perform a R5 3+1?  From my experience a r5 3+1 for databases is 20% faster than raid 1s….

 

I suspect you are very budget conscious and have no-name white boxes….so articles like this,

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/30/more_serial_raid_controllers_from_amcc/

 

Can give you good pointers as what to get….generally avoid SATA, look at SAS….for databases the LSIMegaraid SAS 8888ELP in a raid 5 looks worth buying….maybe a very small disk strip is in order so small raid5 sets….

 

You are ahead of me at present I’m still piloting FDS….

 

Regards

 

 

Here are the specs on the server:
2 x 2.0Ghz Intel Dual Core Xeon
4 x 1Gb Registered ECC RAM
2 x 74Gb Western Digital Raptors
Given that, the hardware issue should be more than sufficient.
Network connections are Gigabit full duplex throughout our cage network.

How would we go about indexing the attributes?

Me and another sys admin have a distinct feeling that it is an issue with the query, but they are going to point blame at us, so we want to make sure that we are golden before saying it's the code.







----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris G. Sellers" <chris.sellers@nitle.org>
To: "Jared B. Griffith" <jared.griffith@farheap.com>, "General discussion list for the Fedora Directory server project." <fedora-directory-users@redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 11:47:35 AM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles
Subject: Re: [Fedora-directory-users] LDAP Accounts for large website

--
- Thank you,
- Jared B. Griffith
- Farheap Solutions, Inc.
- Lead Systems Administrator
- California IT Department
- Email - jared.griffith@farheap.com
- Phone - 949.417.1500 ext. 266
- Cell Phone - 949.910.6542